Renaissance mnemonics, poststructuralism, and the rhetoric of hypertext composition

RENAISSANCE MNEMONICS, POSTSTRUCTURALISM, AND
THE RHETORIC OF HYPERTEXT COMPOSITION

By
RICHARD EDWARD SMYTH

A DISSERTATION PRESENTED TO THE GRADUATE SCHOOL

OF THE UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT

OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF

DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA
1994

In memory of my father, Gerald Smyth,

who was dying while I wrote this,

who died before I finished.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Unlike some others, I do not have so many people to thank that they
cannot be specifically recognized. First of all, I must thank my committee for
their patience and feedback during this entire process. I especially thank Greg
Ulmer, my director, for his constant encouragement, his generous giving of
time for guidance, and his allowing me to grow with and into this disserta-
tion. He has given me not only a methodology, a life-long course of study,
and a way of thinking this discipline beyond its ivory tower boundaries but
also the courage to enjoy what I am doing and to make it relevant to my own
life and experience. Next, I thank the members of our dissertation seminar —
Allen Meek, Lesley Gamble, Richard Howard, Michelle Glaros, and Barry
Mauer — for their imput into the shaping of this project and, more
importantly, their friendship. Other friends who served as my outside
support system — namely Martin and Karen Simpson, Walt Lewallen,
Richard Brobst, and Roy Parkhurst — must not be forgotten. I thank my
parents, too, for always believing in me. And, finally, I thank my wife for
supporting me financially and emotionally as well as my children, who have
borne the brunt of one working on a Ph.D. degree yet somehow still love me.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS iii

ABSTRACT v

INTRODUCTION 1

CHAPTERS

1 GRAMMATOLOGY AND RENAISSANCE STUDIES 17

Towards a Definition of Grammatology 17

Deconstruction in Early Modern Studies 30

The "New Historicism" of Grammatology 42

2 GRAMMATOLOGY IN THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY 55

The Orality-Literacy Debate 59

Sixteenth-Century Mnemonic Practices 68

Spenser and the Memory Palace 80

3 SPENSER'S MNEMONICS OF LITERACY: THE MONUMENTALITY

OF PROSOPOPOEIA 93

Prosopopoeia and the Mnemonics of Literacy 96

The Ideology of Depth and the Prosopopoeia of the Book 117

4 THE AGE OF ELECTRONIC COMPOSITION 136

The Return of Allegory and the Privileging of the Surface 136

Hypertext and the Visual Representation of Information 150

Residual Literacy in Electronic Interface Designs: Allegories of

Book Reading 166

5 RHIZOGRAPHY: A MANIFESTO FOR HYPERTEXT COMPOSITION 178

The Rhizome and Hypertext Writing 178

A Deleuzoguattarian Conception and Method of Hypertext

Composition 186

CONCLUSION 214

LIST OF REFERENCES 224

BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH 238

IV

Abstract of Dissertation Presented to the Graduate School

of the University of Florida in Partial Fulfillment of the

Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy

RENAISSANCE MNEMONICS, POSTSTRUCTURALISM, AND
THE RHETORIC OF HYPERTEXT COMPOSITION

By

Richard Edward Smyth

August, 1994

Chairman: Dr. Gregory L. Ulmer
Major Department: English

This dissertation provides a prolegomenon for a rhetoric of hypertext
composition derived from the Renaissance Art of Memory as well as the
poststructural concept of the rhizome. Institutional inertia has prohibited the
advent of a fully realized electronic rhetoric, and one can view the effects of
this inertia in the "residual literacy" of recent computer interface designs and
hypertext documents. The goal is to maximize the mnemonic efficiency of
hypertext as a medium of information storage and retrieval. In order to do
so, I establish an historical analogy bridging the sixteenth and twentieth
centuries. Study of the sixteenth century as a period of transition in
mnemonic practices can help to negotiate our current moment of transition
from an apparatus of print literacy to an apparatus of electronic literacy.
Adopting the theoretical position of grammatology, which recognizes the

dynamic interaction between technologies of communication and the
institutional practices determining their use in specific circumstances, I point
to the shift in mnemonics that occurs during the sixteenth century as being
caused by changes in the primary technology of communication and in
pedagogical practices, and I suggest that the advent of electronic media will
usher in another change in mnemonics, or strategies of information storage
and retrieval. Edmund Spenser is a case in point; his poems are shown to
reveal his employment of both the ancient oral mnemonic of the memory
palace and the emergent literate mnemonic of print. Prosopopoeia, I argue, is
a trope which theoretically organizes the experience of print literacy and
which provides an illusory sense of control over language. The ideology of
depth that results displaces a surface-oriented understanding of language and
meaning, which is returning with the renewed emphasis on allegory in
literary theory. The historical study of Spenser and sixteenth century
mnemonic practices, therefore, is motivated by a desire to learn from them a
methodological groundwork for composing in hypertext, a three-dimensional
medium which promises to revolutionize a reader's relationship to textuality
as long as a uniquely electronic rhetoric, suited to the peculiar characteristics
of the medium, governs writing with this new tool of communication.

VI

INTRODUCTION

Today, the primary responsibility of English departments in higher
education, in terms of general education (or "core") requirements, calls for
the teaching of composition and rhetoric (i.e. of writing skills) to freshman
students. Beyond this fundamental role, instructors are then charged with
introducing to their students "literature," which at one time encompassed the
canonical classics (or "works") of primarily English and American authors but
which now has opened up to include noncanonical "texts," including post-
colonial, pop cultural, and feminist writings. Students studying in these
courses are usually required to write interpretive essays that demonstrate a
high degree of literacy — that is, the ability to read carefully the text they
interpret and then to write skillfully a clear and persuasive argument
supporting their position. Some of these students choose to major in English,
for various reasons: to be public school teachers, to be future law students, to
be corporate wizards (given the well-rounded education a major in English
provides), or, perhaps, to be English professors.

Such instruction, limited as it is to the precepts of literacy, was fine
prior to the age of electronics, but it is not any longer. The advent of new
media such as video and hypermedia poses problems for those working in
the humanities, namely the problems of reading and writing with these
media and of teaching students to do the same. The filmic and multi-media
qualities of these electronic technologies offer multiple tracks for a denser,

richer information space. With talk of fusing the telephone, the television
and the computer into a single communication medium which will someday
be wired to a data superhighway, the necessity to embrace such compositional
problematics becomes more apparent. Already, the new software MOSAIC, a
tool for browsing the World-Wide Web which provides hypermedia links to
visual and audio information as well as plain text, is encouraging a hyper-
textual form of composition within the Internet itself. My work focuses on
the practical and theoretical problems involved in the invention of an
electronic rhetoric suited to such a hypertextual method of writing.

The dominance of the entertainment industry's appropriation of
electronic technologies, as witnessed in the hegemonic presence of television
and video games, indicates the reluctance of the educational institution to
appropriate these technologies for pedagogical purposes. Such appropriation
is necessary because book reading has become less and less prevalent and will
continue to diminish as the presence of consumer electronics becomes more
pervasive. Haste is necessary, given the speed of the changes that are
occurring and the degree to which English departments lag behind in
responding to the challenge. By adapting to the present reality of this
transitional shift, instructors concerned about preparing students to be critical
readers and effective writers of the electronic texts they will most likely be
encountering in their lives will help to bring about a pedagogy of electronic
rhetoric.

Historians of rhetoric tell of how rhetoric [originally the "art of
speaking," the curriculum which a future rhetor (Greek), or orator (Latin), or
public speaker would undergo], so prominent at certain points in time, was
subordinated to the emergent scientific paradigm of the seventeenth century,
with its emphasis upon clarity and the transparent usage of language. As

Walter Ong writes, those residual oral practices present for millenia after the

advent of alphabetic literacy eventually succumbed to full-blown literate

practices in the centuries following the emergence of the printing press as

"hearing dominance yields to sight-dominance":

Today, when curricula list rhetoric as a subject, it usually means
simply the study of how to write effectively. But no one ever
consciously launched a program to give this new direction to
rhetoric: the "art" simply followed the drift of consciousness
away from an oral to a writing economy. (Orality and Literacy
116-117)

This "drift" shows itself most prominently in contemporary rhetorician

Chaim Perelman's Theory of Argumentation, which only considers the first

three of the five parts of rhetoric, "because he believed they [memoria and

actio ] were not suited to a culture like ours, where discourses circulate all

through the printed word" (Barilli 105).

Barilli's comments directly following this statement are telling, given

my earlier description of the new technologies that will affect the twenty-first

century English department:

But today this limitation [of rhetoric to the first three parts] is not
at all necessary. When Perelman was trained in the 1940s and
1950s, he could not take into account the influence of new tech-
nologies such as the tape recorder and television — tools that
made possible the rediscovery of the importance of pronuncia-
tion and gestures. . . . (105)

Barilli ends his contemporary history of rhetoric with a call for a new

rhetoric, one that takes into consideration the responsibilities that the

electronic technologies require of us: "In short, there are enough reasons to

rewrite an Institutio for our time as comprehensive as Quintilian's, and one

in which special care should be given to all the classical parts of rhetoric,

overlooking none of them" (129). * Recognizing the presence of technologies
of communication that augment mere printed textuality, Barilli's call for an
Institutio is directed to English departments, which have traditionally been
responsible for instruction in rhetorical practices. Ong, too, writing earlier
than Barilli, believes that the '"literate orality' of the secondary oral culture
induced by radio and television awaits in-depth study" (Orality and Literacy
160). The goal of this dissertation will be to attempt to define where such a
rhetoric might begin to seek its rules.

Taking Barilli's dictum into account, one point of departure would be
the beginning itself — the Greek era — not in terms, however, of the history of
rhetoric but in terms of the history of orality. Eric Havelock's The Muse
Learns to Write, which offers a "special theory" of Greek orality, tells of the
important "formula" that he derived from biologist Ernst Mayr's Animal
Species and Evolution. Mayr spoke of cultural evolution as being equivalent
to genetic evolution, which progressed by means of genetically stored infor-
mation. Havelock focuses on the "key element in Mayr's account," determin-
ing this to be the "role played by the accumulation of information and its
storage for re-use in human language" (55). This prompts Havelock to ask,
"How can orality store its information for re-use? How can it preserve its

lln "The Old Rhetoric: An Aide-Memoire," Roland Barthes also calls for a new rhetoric: "At
the source — or on the horizon — of this seminar, as always, there was the modern text, i.e. the
text which does not yet exist. One way to approach this new text is to find out from what point
of departure, and in opposition to what, it seeks to come into being, and in this way to confront
the new semiotics of writing with the classical practice of literary language, which for
centuries was known as Rhetoric. Whence the notion of a seminar on the old Rhetoric: old does
not mean that there is a new Rhetoric today; rather old Rhetoric is set in opposition to that
new which may not yet have come into being: the world is incredibly full of old Rhetoric" (11).
While Barthes may not necessarily be referring to the new rhetoric as a specifically electronic
rhetoric, his purpose in offering a seminar on "the old Rhetoric" is to prepare, as he terms it, a
"point of departure" for the new Rhetoric which, according to Barilli, will be a rhetoric that
incorporates electronic writing.

identity?" (56). Much of Havelock's and Ong's work sets out to answer these
questions.

In digressing to consider Greek orality, we return to the notion of
rhetoric in a narrower sense than normally considered but one which derives
from Havelock's work on orality: namely, rhetoric as the storage of informa-
tion for the purpose of subsequent retrieval. This sense is justified not only
by the anachronistic conception of Homer as an "oral encyclopedia"
(Havelock 57), but also by the notion of the loci communes, the common-
places, in which arguments were stored and could be found (via inventio,
which means "to come upon" in Latin) to develop a speech (Ong, Orality and
Literacy 110; Barthes, "The Old Rhetoric" 64-71). Indeed, even Winifred
Bryan Horner, a contemporary rhetorician and author of the composition
textbook Rhetoric in the Classical Tradition, conceives of rhetoric as informa-
tion storage and retrieval, taking into account contemporary forms of cultural
memoria: "As the classical rhetoricians devised ways to store and retrieve
information from the human memory, the modern rhetorician must also
consider ways to retrieve information from books, libraries, and computers"
(339). Horner acknowledges that the printed book — deriving ultimately from
the alphabetic literacy of the Greeks — is a form of information storage. Part of
our task as English instructors, as mentioned above, is to teach students how
to retrieve information from its source in the books and the place where
books are stored, libraries.

Computers now, as Horner also acknowledges, are quickly becoming
tools for information storage and retrieval, but their effectiveness has been
limited by literate "book" strategies of storage (with the use of the list, the
index, the "table" of contents, the menu, the desktop). Such limitations
impose unnecessary restrictions upon the storage potential of electronic

media. Applying a literate mode of consciousness to the use of computers,
however, is to be expected in this period of transition from an alphabetic
apparatus to an electronic apparatus. After all, Ong locates what he calls
"residual orality" within Western civilization from Greek tragedy up to the
Age of Romanticism, the time when he sees the transition to full-blown
literate consciousness as being completed (Rhetoric, Romance, and
Technology 294-295). But the transition period from an alphabetic to an
electronic apparatus within the educational institution need not take so long
if we work from an analogy of our present moment to these past moments of
technological breakthrough. Despite the newness of the electronic apparatus,
traditions exist within classical rhetoric as well as Medieval and Early Modern
textual production that will offer models for writing within the "writing
spaces" of electronic media.

One such tradition can be found in the Art of Memory. The highly
visual nature of the Art of Memory, in the various ways that it was practiced
from the time of antiquity to the sixteenth century, is well-suited to the new
technology of hypermedia, with its capacity for graphics, animation, and even
quicktime video.2 With the proliferation of video cameras and VCRs on the
one hand and flat-bed scanners and quick-time desktop video on the other,
the writing with images that teachers and scholars abandoned with the
forsaken art of building memory palaces has returned with a vengeance.
What was once considered science fiction in 1984 in the fiction of William
Gibson is now being theorized by cyberspace architects.3 One scholar writes of
the potential of drawing upon this earlier tradition of the Art of Memory:

2 In his video entitled Virtual Play: The Double-Direct Monkey Wrench in Black's Machinery
(1984), Steve Fagin acknowledges the potential of using the Art of Memory by directly alluding
to the memory palace. For an interview with Fagin, see Wollen, October 41 (1987): 75-100.

3 See Benedikt for the "first steps" of such theorization.

The practitioners of mnemonics, especially Bruno and Leibnitz,
had high hopes for a universal language based on spatial, visual
systems. We may realize their hopes through the displays of our
computers. . . . (Nickerson 390)

My purpose in this dissertation, in part, will be to explore these traditions in

order to discover the kinds of strategies available for composition in

hypermedia. The presence of technologies such as hypertext and virtual

reality, after all, is a challenge to current scholars in the humanities to

theorize compositional strategies for storing information in these new media.

Beyond the tradition of the memory palace, which, as I will show,
provides a method of organization particularly well-suited to hypertext, there
is need of a theory of composition that will maximize the potential of the
hypertext medium. Its characteristic of speed, its three-dimensional writing
space, and its capacity to connect information in a multi-linear network all
point to the philosophy of Deleuze as a foundation for this theory. If the
central question of this dissertation concerns the problem of how to write in
hypertext — the problem, that is, of establishing the foundation for an
electronic rhetoric — then, to use the language of classical rhetoric, the
tradition of the memory palace within the Art of Memory will provide
instruction for dispositio or arrangement within a hypertext program, while
Deleuze and Guattari's concept of the rhizome will provide instruction for
elocutio or writing.

But the steps of rhetoric will have to undergo revision to accommodate
the ways that compositional practice changes in an electronic medium such as
hypertext. The rhetorical procedure offered and justified in this dissertation
is specific to one hypertext program, Storyspace, which has characteristics
unique to itself; it may not be helpful for other kinds of hypertext programs
such as Intermedia, HyperCard, or the html coding that creates hypertexts

within the World-Wide Web. Storyspace allows for the fast generation of
textual nodes and links to and from those nodes. This speed allows one to
write as quickly as one is meant to when practicing brainstorming or
inventio, so that the act of writing itself in Storyspace — elocutio, the third
step — collapses into inventio in the process of composing. I suggest that this
characteristic of Storyspace should be foregrounded in compositional
pedagogy within Storyspace, such that, as one brainstorms, one is also writing.
Associational nodes that occur to writers as they write ought to be generated
as they occur to them and pursued either at that moment or left to be picked
up at some later point. In this way the "metonymic slide" of associational
logic will be privileged, and a multi-linear network of various pathways will
be generated. The primary thesis that starts a composition in hypertext may
be completely abandoned by the time the writer finishes, a practice that
should be encouraged in hypertext but that is discouraged in traditional
compositional practices confined to the tenets of print literacy.

Following the initial compositional process, a composer might then
begin to seek patterns that exist among the nodes already generated for the
purposes of dispositio or arrangement. One interesting feature of the
Storyspace program is that it provides the illusion of a three-dimensional
writing space, which challenges one to seek three-dimensional structures as
organizational models for this process of arrangement. I suggest that the
memory palace tradition within classical rhetoric can offer guidance with
such an endeavor, given its three-dimensional illusion of a space that one
fills with images meant to trigger one's memory. Of course, one might start
with dispositio, conceiving of a three-dimensional structure that will govern
the arrangement of the Storyspace before writing begins, as long as the

metonymic style of writing described above is not hindered by such a
procedure.

The confusion of terms, the blurring of definitions, and the possibility
for variable ordering of these steps demonstrate the difficulties encountered
when one begins to consider rhetorical instruction in a hypertext environ-
ment such as Storyspace. My project in this dissertation constitutes an initial
attempt to rectify these difficulties by taking the medium's characteristics into
account as I try to identify the steps of a rhetoric that are determined by the
medium itself. My proposed procedures might be considered a mode or genre
of hypertext writing, in the same way that traditional rhetoric, as many teach
it today, identifies actions such as definition, classification, and narration as
modes or genres of expository writing. I will call this new genre of electronic
rhetoric that I am attempting to invent "rhizography" so as to invoke the
rhizome as its governing principle.

To arrive at that destination, however, a seemingly circuitous pathway
must be taken in order to demonstrate the connections between the sixteenth
century and the twentieth century. The sixteenth century saw a period of
transition similar to our own, with transformations in the technologies of
communication, in institutional practices (specifically in the realm of
pedagogy), and in subject formation. Like the printing press, twentieth-
century electronic technologies promise to transform the way texts are read,
written, disseminated, valued, and taught as well as the way we conceive of
our bodies, our selves, and our interaction with others. Though these latter
concerns are addressed by poststructural theorists who have worked to
implement such transformations, our present methods of instruction and
evaluation are still based in the values of print literacy, and, while they may
be slowly evolving away from such values toward a pedagogy more

10

appropriate to the electronic age, our discipline has been slow to respond to
the challenge posed by electronic media. This dissertation is an attempt to set
a foundation for remedying this state of affairs.

The theoretical framework that justifies a look to the past can be found
in grammatology, understood very simply as the history of reading and
writing practices. The grammatologist believes that technologies of commu-
nication, considered within particular social contexts and taking into account
the institutionalized modes of utilizing these technologies, have an effect
upon communication itself. Achieving an understanding of the dynamics of
these components as they interact in past configurations helps the gramma-
tologist with his or her primary purpose — the invention of new institutional
practices that will fully engage the present technologies of communication.
By finding examples of individuals who have negotiated a period of
transition, the grammatologist can discover in these dynamics heuretic
inspiration for such invention. A large part of this dissertation, then, focuses
primarily on the sixteenth century as a transitional moment similar to our
own. I believe that we can learn about our own moment and how to
negotiate the present transition by examining in detail that prior analogous
moment.

With this goal in mind, I start in chapter 1 to set out grammatology as a
particular application of poststructural theory which differs from strictly
deconstructive applications to literature. My task here will be to discuss
grammatology as a term, define it as a theoretical field of study, and then
situate it within Renaissance studies alongside other poststructural
approaches to the period. While the first section of chapter 1 will gesture
toward a definition of grammatology, it will be through the second and third
sections, in which I will discuss the deconstructive criticism of Jonathan

11

Goldberg and then the new historicist work of Louis Adrian Montrose and
Stephen Greenblatt, that I will more clearly define it as a term, using these
two poststructural approaches to clarify what a grammatological approach to
the Renaissance will be. While deconstruction and new historicism are not
the only established theoretical approaches to the Renaissance, these happen
to be closely akin to the tenets of grammatology.

Having worked in chapter 1 to legitimate grammatology as a viable
course of study and to demonstrate its relationship to other poststructural
approaches, chapter 2 takes on the problem of studying history from a
grammatological perspective. Its purpose is to identify institutional changes
in pedagogical practices — specifically in strategies of mnemotechniques — with
the intent of better understanding the possibilities for improving our current
use of electronic media. In the first part I work to resolve the orality-literacy
debate by positing grammatology as a theoretical solution to the problems that
deterministic histories cause. Doing so clears the way for a grammatological
history of the sixteenth century in the second part, one that looks at the
changing pedagogical practices and how these result in the decline of the
memory palace tradition as the primary art of memory. The transition was
facilitated by the effects of the printing press in conjunction with the rise of
Ramism as a new, literate mnemonic system more suitable to the print
technology of the day. The third part introduces a treatment of Edmund
Spenser that will be further developed in the third chapter; this third part
serves to show Spenser's awareness of the efficacy of the memory palace and
his use of the memory palace tradition in his epic poem The Faerie Queene.
The conclusion of the dissertation will provide an example of how I
employed this knowledge of Spenser's use of the memory palace as a way of
organizing a Storyspace hypertext that I authored.

12

Chapter 3 then performs close readings of Spenser's minor poems in
order to show his employment of the soon-to-be popular format of print,
which monumentalizes the once ephemeral status of mnemonics in its
permanence. These poems exhibit an understanding of prosopopoeia as the
tropic form that mnemonics takes in the era of print literacy, and one can see
Spenser persistently reminding his patrons of this as he pressures them for
funding. This treatment of Spenser's minor poems will include a detour
through the poststructural theory of prosopopoeia and will end with a
reading of Spenser's Prosopopoia, or Mother Hubberds Tale, as Spenser's
poetic manifesto that affirms his poststructural sensibility toward language.
The chapter will end with a recognition of the role that depth plays in
demonstrating Spenser's ambivalence toward the mnemonics of print
literacy, as the privileging of depth is a direct result of alphabetic (and
especially print) literacy.

Spenser's ambivalence is a direct result of his anxiety during this
transitional period of shifting mnemonic systems, an anxiety which is
equivalent to that being experienced today as our culture moves from the
familiar mnemonics of print literacy to the now emergent mnemonics of
"computeracy."4 Moments of transition cause anxiety, as in the transition
from a chirographic to a print culture that I will describe in chapter 3, or

4"Computeracy" is a term I will use throughout to denote the "electronic literacy" that Richard
Lanham calls for in Revising Prose. See especially chapter five of Revising Prose, entitled
"Electronic Literacy." For a source of the term, see R.A. Shoaf s use of "computeracy" in "Gonzo
Scholarship: Policing Electronic Journals." This special issue of Surfaces, an electronic journal
based at the University of Montreal, publishes the proceedings of a panel held at the 1993
MLA meeting. Shoafs essay introduces the three contributors to the panel, whose essays
concern the impact of the Internet upon the profession as well as upon publishing. The essay by
James O'Donnell, in Shoafs words, works to perform the same task as this dissertation: "It is
the great merit of O'Donnell's contribution that he can analogize so clearly and helpfully
between the transition from literacy to computeracy and the transition from manuscripts to
print literacy five hundred years ago. The analogies are extraordinarily helpful in thinking
through the implications of the changes confronting us" (7).

13

Michael Near's description of how Beowulf demonstrates an anxiety for early
Anglo-Saxon culture over the transition from orality to literacy. Near closes
his essay with a general statement that can be applied to any transitional
moment during which a new technology of communication challenges
established ideological practices: "[Beowulf] anticipates the advent of an
intruding technology that promises to undercut the psychological founda-
tions of an entire way of life" (329). One can see a similar kind of anxiety in
current perceptions of virtual reality and its potential effects upon society.
Brenda Laurel writes of her investigation of virtual reality's reception by the
general public, an investigation which found people perceiving the new
technologies as intrusive and as a potential threat to people's psychological
well-being: "The callers were convinced that VR 'providers' are dealers of a
new and powerful drug, luring their hapless victims into a shadowy world of
un-life" ("A VR Field Report" 17). This anxiety is also indicated in the
reluctance of humanities educators to embrace the new technologies as
pedagogical and scholarly tools.

One perceived advantage of the permanence of print is that it also
provides the illusion that language can be controlled, and prosopopoeia
becomes one means for achieving this illusory power, both in the controlled
representation of the voices of the dead and in the dialogue with the book
that allows for hermeneutic closure. I will argue in chapter 3 that the desire
to control language — a desire characteristic of some twentieth-century critical
movements which claim access to a poet's intention, to the historical context
alluded to in a writer's work, or to some essential meaning that can be
determined by proper reading practices — begins with the era of the printed
book. This desire to control language is currently being challenged, however,
by the advent of electronic technologies that render the illusory permanence

14

of print entirely defunct. The ultimate purpose of this chapter is the
identification of the main features of print literacy as they are manifest both
in Spenser's texts and in the characteristics of prosopopoeia as the trope
which can provide within print a manner of controlling language. An
understanding of the dynamics of print literacy will better help us to
understand how computeracy can and should differ.

With chapter 4 comes the move to consideration of present-day
technologies of communication. The first part considers the poststructural
focus on language and how this has brought about a return of allegory and its
privileging of the surface, in opposition to the reign of symbol during the
centuries of print literacy and its privileging of depth. Allegory is shown to be
a surface phenomenon and is thus affirmed to be amenable to the emerging
electronic apparatus. Various poststructural philosophers speak of surface
effects, the turn to which results from a desire to find an anti-Platonic
philosophy that undermines logocentrism, and Deleuze is chosen from
among them as the representative theorist of electronic rhetoric. Before
providing that theory of electronic rhetoric in the fifth chapter, I first explore
the writing space of the computer screen as it is employed in hypertext, first
tracing the history of the organizing of information in space and then
asserting that, given the three-dimensional nature of hypertext programs, the
mnemonic practice of building memory palaces should be remotivated in our
current context. In order to minimize the hindrance of "residual literacy," in
order, that is, to fully engage the communicative potential within the new
electronic media, we must address hypertext as a medium with its own
characteristics that differ from those of print literacy. Chapter 4 amounts to a
contextualization of hypertext within the history of information storage and

15

retrieval and a brief analysis of book metaphors in electronic interface design
as an indication of our continued investment in the methods of print literacy.

Having chosen Deleuze as the spokesman of a philosophy of the
surface and of a return to allegory, I then set out in chapter 5 to define
"rhizography" as a method of writing in hypertext. This method is derived
from Deleuze and Guattari's concept of the rhizome, which embodies the
interconnected network that hypertext manifests in its presentation of a text.
I argue that three characteristics of the rhizome— speed, nomadism, and
density— should govern writing in Storyspace, a hypertext program that is
extremely user-friendly and promises to make the act of brainstorming the
primary aspect of writing, rather than just the first step, as in classical rhetor-
ical training. In its similarity to the neural networks of connectionist theory,
the rhizome can provide the bridge to a writing that more closely resembles
the workings of the mind, as some currently theorize.

This goal of achieving a kind of writing that manifests the associational
leaping of brain activity may seem to some a form of anti-rhetoric, since it
does not require the imposition of organization upon the jumble of thoughts
that is required for communicative efficacy. In such an approach, logos is
privileged over pathos and ethos as the significant defining feature that
makes of rhetoric a form of science akin to biology, geology, pathology, and so
on in that logic and logical development of a persuasive argument are taken
as the norm. This traditional sense of rhetoric emphasizes persuasion and
logical development and is oriented toward a single thesis or a particular goal
of moving an audience to action. Because hypertext allows for multiple
theses and lines of argument that might reach opposing conclusions to coexist
simultaneously in one document, this traditional criterion for the purpose of
rhetoric must be adapted, I am arguing, to allow for the new capacity of

16

communication that hypertext provides. To conceive of it in terms of the
three appeals, hypertext composition will privilege pathos as much as if not
more than logos, in following with the recent assertions of cognitive science,
which finds in the physiological workings of the brain a common denomi-
nator between logical thought and pathical feeling.5 Hypertext promises to
return to scholarly writing and compositional pedagogy in the humanities an
aesthetic emphasis which will by no means eclipse the anaesthetic impulse of
logical argument but which will supplement that impulse to make of reading
and writing a richer experience.

5See Marvin Minsky, The Society of Mind, chapter 16.1: "In any case, our culture wrongly
teaches us that thoughts and feelings lie in almost separate worlds. In fact, they're almost
always intertwined. In the next few sections we'll propose to regard emotions not as separate
from thoughts in general, but as varieties or types of thoughts, each based on a different brain-
machine that specializes in some particular domain of thought" (163).

CHAPTER 1
GRAMMATOLOGY AND RENAISSANCE STUDIES

So long as literary studies are situated as they are now, the most one
can hope for (at least with respect to aims that are realistic) is that your
work will make a difference in the institutional setting that gives it a

home.

— Stanley Fish

Towards a Definition of Grammatologv

Thus Stanley Fish critiques the New Historicists' desire to enter the
political sphere and their expressed concern over their inability to do so in an
effective way. Their aims, he argues, are "unrealistic."

Fish's injunction to focus upon one's own institutional setting, to
work to make changes within it rather than elsewhere, returns to literary crit-
ics a modicum of social power. However limited this power may be within a
specific institution, an English professor, Fish suggests, can work to make
changes within the institution of literary criticism. The ability to intervene,
however, depends upon one's ability to determine where change might be

fruitful.

To the extent that one might want to institute such change, this ability
to determine where change is needed could come only from some awareness
of the history of given institutional practices. All of our current behaviors,
both as scholars and as pedagogues, have evolved over time. The extent to
which these are thought to be natural is the extent to which they have

17

18

become part of our ideological make-up, which complicates our ability to rec-
ognize how they have emerged from a particular cultural and historical
matrix. To some extent it is in the best interests of the institution for such
historical considerations to be ignored, as Samuel Weber notes: "Indeed, the
very notion of academic 'seriousness' came increasingly to exclude reflection
upon the relation of one 'field' to another, and concomitantly, reflection
upon the historical process by which individual disciplines established their
boundaries" (32). Given this difficulty, it is no wonder that a phenomenon I
will call "institutional inertia" occurs, one in which pedagogical and scholarly
practices as pursued within the university setting are perpetuated in estab-
lished customary procedures.

My use of "institution" here refers to only one of its elements, the
sense of the word that Rene Lourau sees as the now dominant conception:
"By emptying the concept of institution of one of its primordial components
(that of instituting, in the sense of founding, creating, breaking with an old
order and creating a new one), sociology has finally come to identify the insti-
tution with the status quo" (quoted in Weber xv). As such, it is meant to
indicate the kinds of relationships a university fosters between scholars and
their scholarship and between scholars and their students, relationships
which are determined by the drive to maintain the status of "professional."
Weber's comments about the professional are helpful here; he writes that
"the professional sought to isolate, in order to control. ... In short, the
culture of professionalism drew much of its force, its 'social credit,' credibility,
from the cultivation and exploitation of anxiety" (27-28). The invocation of
anxiety here is related to Fish's critique of Montrose for being nervous over

19

his success1; it suggests that there is a structure of insecurity in professional-
ism which demands continual justification: "Once the professional has suc-
ceeded in gaining admittance to the 'field/ he can hope to enjoy a measure of
security unknown by other nonprofessional salaried persons: provided, of
course, that he continues to accept and to practice the game according to its
rules" (Weber 31, emphasis added).

Increased specialization within disciplinary pursuits— the desire to iso-
late certain elements of a discipline for specialized study, as Weber notes, in
the pursuit of an idealized notion of professionalism— results in control
wielded not only within the given field but also over students as well. Once a
niche is filled in a particular environment of textual studies, the professional
need not fear being challenged, for s/he is the expert, s/he is the one to con-
sult when questions concerning this narrow bandwidth of information arise.
Such a situation fosters a form of pedagogy that Paulo Freire has suggested
manifests the "banking concept of education," that is, a conception of the stu-
dent-teacher relationship which figures the student as a passive recipient of
"deposits" of knowledge and the teacher as the One Who Knows.2

One force which tends to work against institutional inertia is that of
technological change. At present, this change is coming so quickly that Alvin
Toffler has called it "Future Shock." "Cyberspace," the "Internet," and
"Hypermedia": each of these current technologies, getting press now even in

1 "It is hard to know whether such anxieties are a sign of large ambitions that have been
frustrated ... or a sign of the familiar academic longing for failure— we must be doing
something wrong because people are listening to us and offering us high salaries. But whatever
the source of the malaise, I urge that it be abandoned and that New Historicists sit back and
enjoy the fruits of their professional success, wishing neither for more nor for less." Stanley
Fish, "Commentary: The New Historicism," The New Historicism, ed. H. Aram Veeser (New
York: Routledge, 1989) 315.

2 Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, trans. Myra Bergman Ramos (New York: Herder
and Herder, 1970) 57-74.

20

such journals as Time and Newsweek, is putting pressure upon the educa-
tional institution to reconsider its definitions of scholarship, pedagogy, disci-
plinarity, and even institutionality. In light of these changes, those profes-
sionals within the educational institution and within the discipline of textual
studies itself must begin to ask the questions that such technologies are rais-
ing: What is the role of the teacher? How will disciplinary boundaries be
reconfigured in the new electronic environment? What will scholarly
research become, and how will it change?

Answering these questions can be easier if one investigates the evolu-
tion of reading and writing practices as exercised within the educational insti-
tution. Doing so would provide data about past transitional moments that
might help in the negotiation of the present one. The Renaissance (or "Early
Modern"3 period) is known as a particularly significant moment in terms of
the history of technological and pedagogical change and would therefore war-
rant close investigation. The justification for such an investigation comes
from the field of grammatology, a variant form of Cultural Studies which
considers the traditional questions of subject formation and ideological posi-
tioning as understood in current theoretical treatments in light of the
electronic transformation of language and representation.

Grammatology offers, therefore, a way of thinking about the present
which can only be managed by recourse to a consideration of the institution's
past. Most would associate it with deconstruction, and specifically with

3 There is currently a shift to renominalize "Renaissance Studies" as "Early Modern Studies"
for various theoretical reasons. Jonathan Crewe believes that using the former is a
conservative gesture whereas using the latter is a more progressive one; he asks, "what implied
commitments remain unalterable as long as the category 'Renaissance' remains in force?" Trials
of Authorship: Anterior Forms and Poetic Reconstruction From Wyatt to Shakespeare
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990) 2. His goal is to achieve "representation [of
the Renaissance] radically otherwise" and so sees the use of "Early Modern" as challenging the
"tacit conservation of premises" that the term "Renaissance" carries with it.

21

Jacques Derrick's project in Of Grammatology. But even there it is a term
that refers to the history of reading and writing, and to the ways that such his-
tories have perpetuated certain ideologically motivated evaluations of pres-
ence, the origin, the telos. In the work of Gregory Ulmer, grammatology
becomes a theoretical practice which works to institute institutional change by
focusing upon past institutional practices and attempting to derive new prac-
tices for the use of the emergent electronic technologies. It draws its theoreti-
cal basis and inspiration not only from Derridean deconstruction but also
from contemporary French poststructuralism and twentieth-century literary
theory in general.4 As such, it is a theoretical practice that can be applied to
any text in any era. It will be my intention to explore the Early Modern period
as a grammatologist would, and in doing so demonstrate grammatology's
efficacy as a particularly pragmatic form of literary studies.

To explore the Early Modern period in this way, for the reason of
answering some of the questions posed above, I must first define grammatol-
ogy as a version of literary theory different from other such versions. In the
process of doing so, I will look at some of the contemporary applications of
theory — specifically the deconstructive work of Jonathan Goldberg and the
New Historicist works of Louis Montrose and Stephen Greenblatt— in order
to glean the ways that grammatology is both similar to and different from
current studies.5 This initial work is preliminary to the larger project both of

4 I do not intend to claim here that the term "poststructuralism" denotes a unified theoretical
approach to literary and cultural studies. The grammatologist, however, does focus on those
common denominators among the theorists, for instance the experimental writing projects of
Luce Irigaray in The Marine Lover of Friedrich Nietzsche, of Gilles Deleuze and Felix
Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus, or of Jacques Derrida in Glas, all of which challenge
institutionalized practices of book-literacy.

5 There is a tendency among literary critics to distinguish their own position in the process of
deriding others, as in Greenblatfs "Towards a Poetics of Culture" [The New Historicism, ed. H.
Aram Veeser (New York: Routledge, 1989) 1-14] in which he critiques Jameson's and Lyotard's
definitions of capitalism in order to suggest that his is more "complex": "If capitalism is

22

deriving compositional practices for hypertext from the sixteenth century and
of attempting to learn from the sixteenth century how to negotiate the
current transitional shift in technologies.

The term grammatology came to enjoy its recent theoretical status with
the publication of Derrida's Of Grammatology. While Derrida did not invent
the term, he remotivates it according to his deconstructive program. As he
writes, "Through all the recent work in the area, one glimpses the future
extension of a grammatology called upon to stop receiving its guiding con-
cepts from other human sciences, or, what nearly always amounts to the
same thing, from traditional metaphysics" (83). Following through with the
implications of Derrida's deconstructive work as well as attempting to incor-
porate Derrida's more experimental approach to writing philosophy in the
later works (Glas, The Postcard, The Truth in Painting ) into a pedagogy of

invoked not as a unitary demonic principle [as it is in Jameson and Lyotard], but as a complex
historical movement in a world without paradisal origins or chiliastic expectations [as it is in
Greenblatt's work], then an inquiry into the relation between art and society in capitalist
cultures must address both the formation of the working distinction upon which Jameson
remarks and the totalizing impulse upon which Lyotard remarks" (6). In another strategy
employed to create a niche for themselves in the ecology of textual studies, some critics, like
Derek Alwes in '"Who knowes not Colin Clout?' Spenser's Self-Advertisement in The Faerie
Queene, Book 6," Modem Philology 88 (August 1990), 26-42, work to correct or emend a previous
reading. Alwes corrects Louis Montrose, who believes that Spenser defined himself as being the
Queen's adversary, contesting her authority through his poetry. Alwes believes, on the other
hand, that "the poetic role Spenser defines for himself in his works is that of accomplice, not
adversary"(29). Here, Alwes in effect employs Montrose's method to make a different
assertion. Perhaps the form of argument itself requires such embattled rhetoric, for in each
example the critic assumes he knows the truth and is working to reveal inadequacies in
preceding commentary.

Revelation, then, becomes the primary mode of procedure, as implied by the following
metaphor that Greenblatt employs at the end of "Towards a Poetics of Culture": "It is in
response to this practice [of constructing an interpretive model that will more adequately
account for the unsettling circulation of materials and discourses that is . . . the heart of
modern aesthetic practice] that contemporary theory must situate itself: not outside
interpretation, but in the hidden places of negotiation and exchange" (13, emphasis mine).
Greenblatt works to reveal these "hidden places" to us in his essay. Rather than rely upon
such metaphors of excavation, a theoretical grammatologist works to invent, working
heuretically rather than hermeneutically. In this project, I will invent the institutional
practices (or, more precisely, an institutional practice) for working with hypertext/ hyper-
media in Early Modern studies.

23

Writing, Gregory Ulmer, in Applied Grammatology, further defines the term
in characterizing his application of Derridean (and, beyond Derrida, of
poststructural) theory to pedagogical concerns.6 My work in this dissertation
will build upon Ulmer's, but first I must briefly present the "original"
Derridean conception of the term.

Consistently, throughout part one of Of Grammatology, Derrida uses
grammatology to refer to the history of writing, his purpose in doing so being
to demonstrate what I will call the "cultural inertia" perpetuating philosophic
concepts that began with Plato and Aristotle and continuing within the writ-
ings of Rousseau and Saussure.7 So pervasive is this historical sense of his
work that he frequently uses the term "epoch" to denote the centuries that
logocentrism— the privileging of speech over its writing— has permeated the
foundations of Western philosophical thinking. At one point he states, "This
logocentrism, this epoch of the full speech ..." (43), and thereby demonstrates
through apposition the historical breadth of logocentrism's reign.8 One gets a
real sense that Derrida detects our time as a time of change, of paradigmatic

6 Ulmer writes in the preface of Applied Grammatology. Post(e)-Pedagogy from Jacques
Derrida to Joseph Betiys , "The applied phase of grammatology, which I introduce here, is
meant to be the pedagogical equivalent of this scripting beyond the book, adequate to an era of
interdisciplines, intermedia, electronic apparatus" (xiii). Ulmer indicates this special form of
Derridean writing by capitalizing Writing.

7 See also "The Pit and the Pyramid: Introduction to Hegel's Semiology," Margins of
Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1982) 69-108, in
which Derrida writes, "The process of the sign has a history . . ." (71). His purpose in this
essay, as he states, is to analyze the system of "the coordination of the theory of the sign and
the light of parousia. . . {whose constraints} are exercised, in constitutive fashion, over the
entire history of metaphysics" (72).

8 Of course, this use of history is qualified and itself put into historical perspective; that is,
history itself is seen to be a product of the logocentric dominion: "This phoneticization has a
history, no script is absolutely exempt from it, and the enigma of this evolution does not allow
itself to be dominated by the concept of history. To be sure, the latter appears at a determined
moment in the phoneticization of script and it presupposes phoneticization in an essential way"
(Of Grammatology 88).

24

upheaval in which a shift is occurring between two epochs— between that of
logocentrism and that which poststructuralism is heralding:

The end of linear writing is indeed the end of the book, even if,
even today, it is within the form of a book that new writings-
literary or theoretical — allow themselves to be, for better or for
worse, encased. It is less a question of confiding new writings to
the envelope of a book than of finally reading what wrote itself
between the lines in the volumes. That is why, beginning to
write without the line, one begins also to reread past writing
according to a different organization of space. If today the
problem of reading occupies the forefront of science, it is because
of this suspense between two ages of writing. Because we are
beginning to write, to write differently, we must reread
differently, (emphasis mine, 86-87)

As we shall see, although writers like Derrida and others have pio-
neered, in book form, how such "new writings" will be fashioned, the new
technologies now available to the humanities— in the form of hypertext and
hypermedia programs— will generate the kind of "nonlinear writing" that
Derrida calls for in Of Grammatology. 9

The sense of grammatology, then, that Ulmer adopts from Derrida is
this historical sense, the sense that grammatology refers to the history of read-
ing and writing. He rereads Derrida's "oeuvre from a perspective that turns
attention away from an exclusive concern with deconstruction." In doing so,
Ulmer substitutes "grammatology" for "deconstruction," as he writes in his
preface to Applied Grammatology, in order to privilege Writing, "in order to
explore the relatively neglected 'affirmative' (Derrida's term) dimension of
grammatology, the practical extension of deconstruction into decomposition"
(x). Defining a sense of the "apparatus" as that which not only maps the

9 On the equivalence of "nonlinear dynamics" (as an aspect of what recent breakthroughs in
physics are labelling "chaos theory") with deconstruction, see N. Katherine Hayles, Chaos
Bound: Orderly Disorder in Contemporary Literature and Science (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1990):
"Deconstruction and nonlinear dynamics appear isomorphic, then, because the concepts with
which they are concerned form an ecology of ideas" (185) .

25

intersection between the various technologies of writing practices and the
institutional incorporations of these practices but also considers the resultant
subject formation that emerges from these intersections, Ulmer is able to
expand the sense of grammatology to include reflection upon these broader
concerns. His ultimate purpose in doing so is to glean pedagogically relevant
institutional practices from the provinces of deconstruction, practices which
he works to show are employed directly by Derrida himself.10

As such, Ulmer's position on grammatology enables one to consider
the history of pedagogical practices as codified by educational institutions,
specifically how technologies of writing inform and are informed by these
practices. Sharon Crowley might also be called a grammatologist in the sense
that she too takes the broad view of composition instruction and finds, in her
Methodical Memory: Invention in the Current-Traditional Rhetoric, that
current instruction has, as its "epistemological underpinnings," a logocentric
epistemology which emerged in the eighteenth century. She writes, "One of
my book's central points is that current-traditional rhetoric is a historical
hangover. Its epistemology, and the pedagogy associated with it, need
rethinking" (xii).11 Both Crowley and Ulmer find it necessary to consult

10 As Ulmer writes, "The ultimate deconstruction of the logocentric suppression of writing is not
to analyze the inconsistency of the offending theories, but to construct a fully operational mode
of thought on the basis of the excluded elements (in the way that the non-Euclideans built
consistent geometries that defied and contradicted the accepted axioms)" (Applied
Grammatology xii). According to Ulmer, Derrida works to construct this mode of thought: he
"systematically explores the nondiscursive levels — images and puns, or models and
homophones— as an alternative mode of composition and thought applicable to academic work,
or rather, play" (xi). See Text Book by Scholes, Comley, and Ulmer for an experimental
"deconstructive" composition textbook for teaching writing about literature.

11 In A Teacher's Introduction to Deconstruction (Urbana: National Council of Teachers of
English, 1989), an introduction to high school instructors explaining deconstruction and its
implications for writing instruction, Crowley concludes that many instructors now contradict
themselves by teaching traditional rhetorical strategies for writing based on the logocentric
mode while at the same time espousing, in their reading practices and interpretive work, a
more progressive poststructural epistemology.

26

history in their attempt to critique current pedagogical practices so that the
discipline of English can move beyond, in whatever ways this is possible, the
confines of a logocentric epistemology.12

What is at stake here is the state of educational practices in the late
twentieth century, in the impending (or already present) "age of informa-
tion," the age of data highways and cyberspatiality which is now upon us. As
a dissertation on the ways in which academic scholarship in Early Modern
studies may change when pursued in hypermedia, this "book," a manifesta-
tion of linear writing which Derrida views as being on the way out, will dis-
cuss a nonlinear form of writing in a linear manner, simply because the insti-
tutional inertia surrounding Ph.D. work will not allow me to submit a hyper-
text as partial fulfillment of the requirements for a doctoral degree. I could
compose a hypertext, but it would have to be submitted in addition to a full-
length manuscript of a dissertation. Such a state of affairs provides no moti-
vation for a doctoral candidate to do the extra work of composing in a new
and alien medium, thus perpetuating the institution's love-affair
with/reliance upon the book. The institution will not yet accept electronic
essays as a legitimate form of scholarship because it is still bound up within
the practices of literacy. Stuart Moulthrop notes the absurdity of working dur-
ing this transitional time, during which we read and write about hypermedia
in printed books:

Why aren't you reading this document in a hypertext system?

How is it that those of us who analyze hypertext, even those of

12 Of the two, Crowley is more pessimistic about the possibility of doing so than Ulmer is. In A
Teacher's Introduction to Deconstruction, she writes, "The performance of this 'reading' of
traditional pedagogy may be as far as deconstruction will take us. I am not sure that a
deconstructive pedagogy can be realized— the term is itself an oxymoron" (45). Despite this
disclaimer, she does go on to suggest ways that instructors implementing a deconstructive
pedagogy would conduct themselves, many of which are similar to those proposed by Stanley
Aronowitz and Henry A. Giroux in Postmodern Education: Politics, Culture, and Social
Criticism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991).

27

us who promote and proselytize for it, carry on our
communications primarily in print? What does this preference
imply, both about the organizations interested in hypertext and
about the systems they develop and study?13

One question that this dissertation intends to propose concerns the
relationship of hypermedia to Early Modern studies: how will the forms of
writing that Early Modern scholars engage in as well as the kinds of questions
posed about Early Modern texts change when hypertext composition becomes
the norm rather than the exception? Because a new technology of writing
exists, one that radically changes the ways that writers compose, scholars pub-
lish, students and instructors interact, and, perhaps most importantly, the
way that readers read, the question of how this new technology will be
implemented and what such implementation will mean for how teaching
and scholarship are conducted must be further explored.14

My look at the sixteenth century is motivated thus by the recognition
that this period not only harbors potential practices for dispositio within
hypertext compositions but also offers an historical analogy of a pedagogical
crisis brought on by a new technology. One example of the degree of this
crisis is Peter Ramus who, as a theorist of the page who invented a
mnemonic method intended to exploit the communicative potential of the
printed page, was murdered as a result of the upheavals he created in

13 Stuart Moulthrop, a pioneer in hypertext studies who has already begun to compose texts in
such hypermedia systems as Macintosh's HyperCard and Eastgate System's Storyspace, here
implies that the features of hypertext will reconstruct institutional relationships to such an
extent that the institution will resist its adoption. The piece cited here appeared in an essay
entitled "The Shadow of an Informand: A Rhetorical Experiment in Hypertext,'' Perforations
3: After the Book, spring/summer 1992, ed. Richard Gess.

14 Initial explorations have been made by George Landow in Hypertext: The Convergence of
Contemporary Critical Theory and Technology (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1992) and also
in a book edited by Landow and Paul Delaney entitled Hypermedia and Literary Studies
(Cambridge: MIT Press, 1991).

28

education. A parallel has been drawn between Ramist's effect on the
sixteenth century and Derrida's effect upon our own in terms of pedagogical
upheaval.15 While Derrida does not specifically employ the new technologies
nor has the ostensible purpose of influencing pedagogy in the ways that
Ramus did, the implications of his work have begun to trickle down into
composition textbooks and pedagogical treatises.16 Embracing the grammato-
logical frame, then, with its consideration of the history of reading and
writing and of how this history has determined current pedagogical practices,
allows for a more self-conscious procedure to take place, one in the spirit of
postmodernism and poststructuralism.

The adoption of such a self-conscious attitude toward the way we con-
duct ourselves as professionals will enable us to recognize the epistemological
metaphors underlying our methodologies which unconsciously shape our
(institutional) behaviors.17 Part of the value of a deconstructive approach is
this very detection and exposure of foundational metaphors. The grammato-
logical approach I am attempting to describe here goes beyond mere exposure,
however: again, to repeat a previously cited passage from Applied
Grammatology, it tries to develop the "relatively neglected 'affirmative'
dimension of grammatology." What this means is that, after exposing a par-
ticular metaphor, an alternative one is offered in its place, one that provides a

15See Ulmer's recent publication, Heuretics: The Logic of Invention, pp. 18-19.

16For one example beyond the already mentioned work of Crowley and Ulmer, see Writing and
Reading Differently: Deconstruction and the Teaching of Composition and Literature. Eds. G.
Douglas Atkins and Michael L. Johnson. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1985. See also
the special issue of College Literature entitled Literary Theory in the Classroom 18.2 (1991).

17 See Paul de Man, "The Epistemology of Metaphor," Critical Inquiry 5: 1 (Autumn 1978), 13-
30, in which he exposes how major Western philosophers, in trying to avoid the use of
metaphor, cannot do so: "All philosophy is condemned, to the extent that it is dependent upon
figuration, to be literary ..." (28).

29

conceptual framework other than that which already exists, one that permits
a transgression of boundaries previously held to be insurmountable or
assumed to be natural.18

It is curious, to say the least, that the computer I am using at present
has a "desktop," that information is stored in the form of "documents"
within "files," when in reality the resemblance of the computer's desktop to
my own is slight, and the computer always seems much faster at locating
documents in files than I am.19 And the documents in my desk files are
permanent items (barring a fire), whereas this document, at present stored as
a series of ones and zeroes (a coding system that informs an electronic
machine when to turn certain switches on and when to leave them off) is
much more ephemeral. The point here is that we have entered the age of
computers carrying the metaphoric baggage of alphabetic literacy, baggage
which, while perhaps expedient for the moment, may weigh us down more
than is necessary. The metaphor of "baggage" is appropriate since, as a
grammatologist, I am concerned with the storage and retrieval of informa-
tion, how this was done in the past, how it is done now, and how it might be
done in the future.

18 This is precisely what Derrida does in his overall project, according to Ulmer: upon
undermining the primary metaphors governing cognition— the senses of distance (sight and
hearing)— Derrida provides an alternative, an alternative discovered in the neglected
possibilities of the vehicle: the chemical senses of proximity (taste and smell). That is, in
recognizing the complicity of visual metaphors of cognition (implicit in the Latin "videre"
which means both "I see" and "I understand ") in the hegemony of logocentrism, Derrida
suggests that using the chemical senses as alternatives can provide a way to undermine
logocentrism. See Ulmer, Applied Grammatology, 30-67: "The philosophemes are to be
deconstructed by an examination of their metaphors— specifically, the vehicles, the senses or
sensible aspect of the organs. The goal is the conceptualization of the chemical senses, excluded
thus far from theory" (54).

19 The limitations of the "desktop" metaphor in computer interface design have been noted.
See especially Alan Kay's article "User Interface: A Personal View" in The Art of Human-
Computer Interface Design, ed. Brenda Laurel (New York: Addison-Wesley Publishing
Company, Inc., 1990) 191-207.

30

So a grammatologist might approach the Early Modern period with the
purpose in mind of finding metaphors that could serve as an alternative to
current metaphors of information storage practices, metaphors that are per-
haps more suitable to the potential capacities of the computer interface. The
mnemotechnics of the sixteenth century, as I intend to suggest, may provide
just the alternative to existing mnemographies— to methods of storing and
retrieving information. But before entering such an investigation, which
will begin in chapter 2 by recounting the history of the memory palace and
continue in chapter 3 with a close look at Spenser's use of the memory palace
in The Faerie Queene, I must further define grammatology and will do so by
discussing two of the more systematic applications of contemporary French
theory to Early Modern studies— that is, deconstruction and new
historicism— in order to show, by contrast, how grammatology compares.
This approach to the problem seeks not only to define grammatology as a
consistent and focused theoretical approach but also to legitimate it as an
application of theory that is particularly amenable to the sixteenth century.
This chapter, then, works to define; the next chapter demonstrates an
exemplary application of grammatology to the sixteenth century in general
and to Edmund Spenser in particular.

Dpronstruction in Early Morlprn Studies
Despite the apparent flowering of theoretical investigations of the Early
Modern period, a conservative strain still lingers, a strain that is quite perva-
sive, as Jonathan Goldberg notes in a review essay on "The Politics of
Renaissance Literature": "I cannot close without remarking the persistence of
older modes of criticism, and the sad fact that these represent a historicism
vitiated of the vitality and intelligence and moral seriousness of the work of

31

Douglas Bush or Helen Gardner and devoid too of the rigor of a Cleanth
Brooks" (538).20

Within this landscape of Early Modern studies, a landscape seemingly
barren of theoretical work, one comes upon deconstruction, which some
would consider an oasis of pure water and others would view as a deadly trap
of quicksand. With critics as erudite as Kenneth Gross, Patricia Parker, David
L. Miller and Jonathan Goldberg— all of whom adopt a deconstructive
approach, some to a greater extent than others— able to invent21 the
moments of deconstruction that they write about in texts of the Early Modern
period, one might view this period as inherently receptive to such a critical
and philosophical perspective.22 Given that historical moment, at which
time no standardized English dictionaries or grammars of English existed,23

20 Despite the fact that this essay is now over a decade old, the condition Goldberg describes
does not seem to have changed much, as Louis Montrose notes in his more recent essay entitled
"Professsing the Renaissance: The Poetics and Politics of Culture," in The New Historitism, ed.
H. Aram Veeser (Routledge: New York, 1989) 15-36: "Until very recently— and perhaps even
now_the dominant mode of interpretation in English Renaissance literary studies has been to
combine formalist techniques of close rhetorical analysis with the elaboration of relatively
self-contained histories of 'ideas,' or of literary genres and topoi— histories that have been
abstracted from their social matrices" (17-18). Montrose goes on to describe "two other
traditional practices of 'history' in Renaissance literary studies," practices which reflect what
I have called the conservative strain, and then proceeds to point out what is "new" about the
new historicism. Montrose is perhaps the most helpful in understanding the history of new
historicism and its emergence on the critical "scene."

21 I use "invent" here to invoke both the sense of coming upon or finding (the classical rhetorical
conception) as well as the more modern conception of fabricating or making. It is widely
acknowledged, in the poststructural paradigm, that critics no longer uncover the Truth of any
given text but that they take part in constructing the meanings that are generated from their
reading.

22 Goldberg says that, "as Foucault shows, the very shape of knowledge in the Renaissance is
deconstructive" (Emilesse Worke 11, note 5).

23 William Caxton, the renowned printer, critic and translator best known for introducing the
printing press into England in 1476, bemoaned this state of affairs in a prologue to his
translation of the French poem Eneydos (1490) and called for standardization in spelling and
punctuation so that printers like himself could do their job that much easier: "Loo what sholde
a man in thyse dayes now wryte egges or eyren / certaynly it is harde to playse euery man / by
cause of dyuersite & chaunge of langage." Quoted in W.F. Bolton, A Living Language: The
History and Structure of English (New York: Random House, 1982).

32

one could argue that the state of the language itself was a breeding ground for
linguistic behaviors that would later come to be recognized as deconstructive:
fluidity, instability, indeterminacy.24 If deconstruction could emerge during
the twentieth century — the age of linguistic standardization par excellence
with the OED and the Harbrace Handbook— to describe the supposedly
inherent instability of language , then imagine what things were like at a time
when one could sign one's name seven different ways.

Perhaps one of the best-known practitioners of deconstruction in the
Early Modern period is Jonathan Goldberg, whose earlier writings include a
full-length deconstructive study, entitled Endlesse Worke, of the fourth book
of Spenser's Faerie Queene as well as an innovative book of essays entitled
Voice Terminal Echo, which covers a range of Early Modern writers, essays
attempting to go beyond the rational hermeneutics of some versions of
deconstructive criticism.25 While the former is more characteristic of the
kind of work done when applying deconstruction to an author's text, the
latter is a significant departure from standard textual studies, one which

24 In fact, many of these critics seem to work with this as an underlying assumption, since they
seem to present their discoveries of deconstructive characteristics within Spenser's texts as
though Spenser himself were a Derridean. Of course, this is a common critique of any
theoretical application, one which may even be unavoidable despite the gestures that even
self-reflexive critics like Gross, Miller, Greenblatt Montrose, and Goldberg make toward
acknowledging their presence in the critical mediation of Spenser's texts.

25 I choose Jonathan Goldberg as an exemplary representative of deconstructive criticism in the
Early Modern period as a conscious act of reduction, since to cover the critics mentioned above
alone would cost space I do not have. The trajectory of his career, too, is most interesting: going
from Endlesse Worke to a book on ]ames 1 and then on to the deconstructive essays in Voice
Terminal Echo, he follows these with a historical study I will later argue is
"grammatological," entitled Writing Matter. From the Hands of the English Renaissance, and
his most recent book, Sodometries, which is classified in the ascendant category of "gay
studies." In his career, therefore, one sees a nomadic progression, one which is sensitive to the
changing possibilities that poststructuralism has allowed and which has responded to these
possibilities with works that continue to demand attention.

33

challenges the means and the ends of scholarship as it is practiced today
within the academy.

In Endlesse Worke: Spenser and the Structures of Discourse, Goldberg
offers a poststructural reading, as he assumes what most traditional critics
fight to suppress — that Spenser's Faerie Queene is a broken text, a fractured
text.26 For this reason, he views the Faerie Queene as a text whose narrative,
because broken, concerns the nature of narration.27 So, rather than trying to
account for the frustrating moments in the text, providing hermeneutic clo-
sure wherever such closure is lacking, Goldberg privileges frustration, asking,
"What are the virtues of, the pleasures offered by, a broken text?" (1). His pro-
ject, then, offers "a way of reading Spenser," one which describes the "narra-
tive principles that induce frustration, that deny closure .... [T] he generation
of the text and its production is my subject" (xi-xii).

Goldberg's language reveals his essentializing gesture: he wants to find
the "narrative principles," to clarify the "nature" of narrative progress. In
doing so, he is naturalizing the features of the deconstructive analytic mode
by suggesting that the denial of closure is a feature inherent in narrative

26 Louis Montrose, in "Professing the Renaissance: The Poetics and Politics of Culture,"
adequately summarizes two "traditional practices of 'history' in Renaissance literary studies:
one comprises those commentaries on political commonplaces in which the dominant ideology of
Tudor-Stuart society — the unreliable machinery of socio-political legitimation — is
misrecognized as a stable, coherent, and collective Elizabethan world picture, a picture
discovered to be lucidly reproduced in the canonical literary works of the age; and the other,
the erudite but sometimes eccentric scholarly detective work which, by treating texts as
elaborate ciphers, seeks to fix the meaning of fictional characters and actions in their reference
to specific historical persons and events" (18). For an example of both the former and the latter
types of traditional practices that Montrose mentions, see William Nelson's The Poetry of
Edmund Spenser. New York: Columbia University Press, 1963.

27In describing the altered 1596 ending and introducing its deconstructive qualities, Goldberg
writes, "It seems arguable, and I will want to maintain the point, that this revision clarifies
the nature of narrative progress throughout the poem and suggests the peculiar pleasures this
text offers" (2, emphasis added).

34

itself.28 One could argue that, given the generic mode within which Goldberg
works— the academic essay— he cannot avoid such a gesture. As a genre
which privileges the explanatory, the academic essay reinforces the logocen-
tric foundations of its formulation: in it, Goldberg claims and argues for a
truth, the truth of narrative's nature, despite his investment in the tenets of
deconstruction and poststructuralism.29

Thus, Goldberg's talk of Spenser's text "clearly conveying" the fact that
writing comes before representation reveals his investment in a conven-
tional, rationalist, scientific manner of proceeding which, in the end, perpet-
uates the entire logocentric model and its institutional manifestations that
the philosophy seeks to undermine.30 By engaging the metaphor of sight in

28Other critics make similar gestures. Patricia Parker, in Inescapable Romance: Studies in the
Poetics of a Mode (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1979), defines romance as being "characterized
primarily as a form which simultaneously quests for and postpones a particular end, objective,
or object . . ." (4). She isolates the key strategies of romance as being "deferral" and "delay,"
both falling under the notion of "dilation." Parker demonstrates how Spenser's texts perform
such dilatory strategies: "by repetition and doubling, by the proliferation of the fragments of
one episode into others . . ." (70). With her focus on "dilation," she, like Goldberg, provides a
way of discussing Spenser's narrative in terms of Derridean "differance." Kenneth Gross, too, in
Spenserian Poetics: Idolatry, konoclasm, and Magic (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1985), carefully
foregrounds his discussion in a reading of Hebraic, Kabbalistic, and New Testament texts so as
to claim that Spenser had an attitude toward language very similar to recent deconstructive
theories of language. Like Goldberg, Gross works to explain why Spenser would approach
language as uncertain and duplicitous, why he would intentionally confuse beginnings and
endings and mystify their origins.

29N. Katherine Hayles, in Chaos Bound: Orderly Disorder in Contemporary Literature and
Science, writes of how the deconstructionist can be more totalizing than those texts s/he
deconstructs: "There is a growing inclination within literary circles to regard deconstruction in
these terms, as a theory of local knowledge more totalizing than the totalizing theories it
criticizes" (227). She goes on to praise Paul de Man for his brilliance in recognizing this fact in
his essay "The Resistance to Theory": "When Paul de Man creates a global theory of local
knowledge, he simultaneously repudiates and practices mastery in this sense, for he resists

totalization by totalizing The ideology of local knowledge, pushed to the extreme, is thus

inextricable from the totalitarian impulses it most opposes. The unflinching honesty with
which de Man faces this paradox is admirable, for it implies a profound awareness that
impulses toward mastery are still masterful even when they are directed against mastery"
(232).

30I will quote the passage in its entirety, a passage from a footnote: "The reversal here is
extremely significant since a normative boundary is crossed. The opposition of speaking and
writing is analogous to the opposition of nature and culture, of inferiority and exteriority. As

35

"clearly," Goldberg relies upon the ultimate sense of objectification, sight —
that which the entire metaphysics of the West relies upon, that which serves
as the primary trope of understanding — to make his claim about the post-
structural nature of Spenser's text. Such a metaphor elicits de Man's study in
"The Epistemology of Metaphor" of the Early Modern philosophers Locke
and Condillac, who sought to skirt the inherent metaphoricity of language to
write a "plain" and "clear" style, one unhindered by the ornaments of lan-
guage, one transparently conveying the meaning along reductively con-
structed two-dimensional vectors.31 By raising the standard of transparency,
of clarity, Goldberg perpetuates the privileging of clarity as a metaphorical
term laden with culturally attributed value.

While it is true that Derrida himself employs a rational and logical
approach in his deconstructions of the major Western philosophers — after
all, one cannot avoid participating in that which one deconstructs — we see
Derrida gradually move away from such a straightforward approach toward
more radical experimental texts like The Post Card, The Truth in Painting,
and Glas. Ulmer is helpful here in distinguishing between the two
approaches that Derrida takes:

The difference between Writing and deconstruction may be seen
most clearly in the ways Derrida treats philosophical works
(which he deconstructs) and literary or artistic texts (which he

Derrida argues in Of Grammatology (pp. 6 ff.), this opposition is weighted in terms of value
and sequence, so that the terms nature-inside-speech are granted priority and value,
spirituality. However, they can be reversed, and Of Grammatology is intent upon the reversal
that allows writing-culture-exteriority to precede or replace the opposing terms. When we
approach Spenser's writerly text, one thing we mean— and one thing that Spenser's text clearly
conveys — is that writing comes before representation. Voice in the proem is an artifact, a
cultural construct, an echo of other texts; nature is made by art'' (15, note 7, emphasis added).

31"In all three instances, we started out from a relatively self-assured attempt to control tropes
by merely acknowledging their existence and circumscribing their impact. . . . But, in each case,
it turns out to be impossible to maintain a clear line of distinction between rhetoric, abstraction,
symbol, and all other forms of language" ("The Epistemology of Metaphor," 26).

36

mimes). The methodologies in the two instances bear little
resemblance to each other: the philosophical work is treated as
an object of study, which is analytically articulated by locating
and describing the gap or discontinuity separating what the work
"says" (its conclusions and propositions) from what it "shows"
or "dis-plays" (its examples, data, the materials with which it, in
turn, is working). Literary or plastic texts (a "new new novel" by
Sollers, or drawings by Adami, for example) are not analyzed but
are adopted as models or tutors to be imitated, as generative
forms for the production of another text. {Applied
Grammatology x-xi)

Understood in these terms, Endlesse Worke privileges the mode of decon-
struction rather than the mode of Writing. In doing so, it reinforces the
explanatory mode of academic writing which works within the metaphoric
structure of seeing as understanding.

Voice Terminal Echo comes closer to privileging the mode of Writing,
demonstrating Goldberg's refusal to repeat mundanely the formulaic gesture
of conventional deconstructive application. What makes Voice Terminal
Echo different is the fact that Goldberg chooses to emulate Derrida's texts
rather than merely to explicate them. One sees this immediately at the open-
ing of the book, where Goldberg begins by playing with the various senses of
"terminal," a word which now can refer to a computerized telephone as well
as evoke the more common notion of something ending or "terminated":
"Receiver and sender are at their terminals, voice terminated. The end of the
voice and the beginning of the terminal: a technological image of the text, of
this text, too, with its images of relays and circuits — of the short-circuiting of
the voice" (1). This is verbal play characteristic of Derrida, unfolding the
metaphors inherent in the word, using his titles to suggest something of the
essay to come: do we read the title as "Voice: Terminal Echo," or "Voice:

37

Terminated Echo," or perhaps "Voice Terminated— Echo"?32 He also unveils
his method, relieving me of the need to describe it; it is actually a part of his
argument: "The project of these pages, to be brief: to show in the Renaissance
text voice-as-text, and to show it through a practice of voice terminated" (1).

The crucial words here are "show" and "practice": Goldberg will
"show" us rather than tell us; he will engage in a "practice," a word which
bears within it a sense of performance, the act of doing something. Soon
after this lively opening, Goldberg explicitly reveals the source of his method
(or what some would call "madness"): "In another light, they are a set of
readings of texts that are . . . demonstrations of techniques of reading conse-
quent upon the work of writers like Maurice Blanchot or Jacques Derrida" (5).
As such, "the voice on these pages is not singly determined to a procedure of
logical demonstration. Multiple and fractured, it responds to texts and
recounts them, pursuing and permitting disseminative practice" (4).
Ultimately, by abandoning argument as his procedural strategy, Goldberg pro-
poses here a radical departure from traditional critical practice: "What fol-
lows is not structured as an argument and resists such structures, eschewing
(so far as possible) the critical impulse to totalize and the historical drive
towards teleological closure" (4).

So Voice Terminal Echo avoids the strictly explanatory mode practiced
in Endlesse Worke and in this sense is "radical," that is, starts at the root of
what constitutes academic scholarship: the desire to clarify and explain in
flawlessly logical argumentative writing. As such, it is a book that can be as
frustrating to read as Goldberg claims that Spenser's The Faerie Queene is,
perhaps because of its almost poetic quality: we are asked to read Goldberg's

32 See, for instance, the untranslatable titles and subtitles of "White Mythology: Metaphor in
the Text of Philosophy," Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: The University of
Chicago Press, 1982) 207-271, untranslatable because of the cluster of puns they radiate.

38

book of essays as poems which employ a style that is "allusive, disconnected,
multiple, lyrical, fragmentary, dense, insubordinate — a challenge, in short, to
logical discriminations" (VTE 8). This is Goldberg's description of Derrida's
style(s), but it equally describes his own in Voice Terminal Echo — as it
should, given his attempt to demonstrate Derrida's techniques of reading.
Ultimately, for Goldberg's work to be effective in the academy, the goal of
producing literary criticism must change from hermeneutic closure to
heuristic (or, as Ulmer would call it, "heuretic") opening.33

It would be useful at this point to begin seeking, through comparison
with these Goldberg texts, something of how a grammatological approach will
differ. I delineate above the difference between Endlesse Worke and Voice
Terminal Echo: whereas the former seeks to explain how deconstructive
concepts work within Spenser's text, the latter seeks to employ deconstruc-
tive concepts as a means to generate (critical) essays which show as well as
tell. Like Goldberg in Voice Terminal Echo, the grammatologist desires to
displace logical argument from its dominance within the hierarchy of aca-
demic genres of writing in order to institute a "metarational" discourse,
which Derrida claims, at the end of his consideration of "Grammatology as a
Positive Science," will be a result of his meditation on writing: "The meta-
rationality or the meta-scientificity which are thus announced within the
meditation upon writing can therefore be no more shut up within a science
of man than conform to the traditional idea of science" (0/ Grammatology
87, my emphasis).34 Such a "meta-rational" discourse would avoid the

33 In Ulmer's latest book, entitled Heuretks: The Logic of Invention , Ulmer defines heuretics
as "the branch of logic that treats the art of discovery or invention."

34 I take "meta-rationality" to refer to the "logic" of the arational, to a desired goal which
avoids the binaristic thinking of rational thought. The major philosophers of
poststructuralism work to undermine the hegemony of reason within modern philosophy (and
this is perhaps why their work is considered so alien and therefore shunned in many

39

violence of classification, a pejorative term which the sciences are known for
among poststructuralist thinkers.35

So grammatology is similar to Goldberg's work in Voice Terminal
Echo, both arguing against the current mode of critical practice, offering an
alternative in its stead. But while both seek guidance for how to proceed in
the major texts of poststructural philosophers, the grammatologist does not
seek to emulate their difficult and impenetrable style, as Goldberg ends up
doing in his book of essays (a fact demonstrated by DeNeef's comments indi-
cating their potential difficulty). While Goldberg's text engages a different
and radical approach, it has the air of inaccessibility that many texts labelled
"poststructural" have. A grammatological criticism, on the other hand,
wants to prepare texts that are accessible to others, not only texts that can be
read but also texts that generate the desire to write in the same transgressive
manner that they embody.36

quarters). Barthes, in A lover's Discourse: Fragments, trans. Richard Howard (New York:
Hill & Wang, 1978), looks forward to "the glorious end of logical thinking" (61); Deleuze and
Guattari offer a "new logic of the AND" [A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and
Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: The University of Minnesota Press, 1987)
25]— the rhizome — which is opposed to the binary logic of the tree; and Derrida speaks of the
"logic of the abyme" as the "figurative ruination of logic" ("White Mythology" 262).

35 Part One of Of Grammatology ends with a consideration of how difficult it is to comment
upon the epoch of logocentric domination within this tradition itself, using the very conceptual
paraphernalia Derrida is attempting to deconstruct, of how his revision of grammatology
cannot be called a science: "What seems to announce itself now is, on the one hand, that
grammatology must not be one of the sciences of man and, on the other hand, that it must not be
just one regional science among others" (83). And elsewhere: "A science of the possibility of
science? A science of science which would no longer have the form of logic but that of
grammatics?" (27-28). See also "The Law of Genre," in which Derrida reads Blanchot's La
Folie du jour as a direct challenge to the violence of classificatory thinking, the "madness of
law — and, therefore, of order, reason, sense and meaning, of day" (228). Barthes, too, writes, "I
enable you to escape the death of classification" (A Lover's Discourse 221), and Reda
Bensmaia, in his forward to Deleuze and Guattari's Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, writes,
"Deleuze and Guattari give the modern reader a means by which to enter into Kafka's work

without being weighted down by the old categories of genres, types, modes, and style These

categories would imply that the reader's task is at bottom to interpret Kafka's writing"
(xiv).

36 Ulmer says as much in his chapter on Beuys in Applied Grammatology: "... a further
pedagogy of creativity is also set in motion, intended not only to show people the principles of

40

An example of such an experimental text, one that is accessible even to
freshman English students, can be seen in Text Book, a writing-about-litera-
ture text informed by poststructural principles. One of the optional tracks in
chapter four of this text, co-authored by Robert Scholes, Nancy Comley, and
Gregory Ulmer, prepares the students to write a "signature" essay, which is
based on the theoretical writing of Derrida. The text that they model their
assignment after, "A Jarrett in Your Text," was written by James Michael
Jarrett, a former student of Ulmer's. In my experience of teaching this
textbook, students can successfully emulate Jarrett's experiment,37 using their
own names. They therefore employ sophisticated philosophical concepts of
language developed by a leading poststructural philosopher, some greatly
enjoying themselves in the process. The fact that this is at all possible stands
as a tribute to the goal of democratization which the grammatologist adopts.38

creativity and how to put them into practice but also— and here is the particular power of the
new pedagogy, beyond deconstruction— to stimulate the desire to create . . ." (264).

37 See Ulmer's essays that conceptualize pedagogy in the humanities in terms of the pedagogy
of the sciences, essays that propose assignments in which students are asked to replicate the
great experiments of avant garde literature in the same manner that chemistry or physics
students are asked in the sciences to replicate the great experiments of those disciplines:
"Textshop for Post(e)pedagogy," Writing and Reading Differently, eds. G. Douglas Atkins and
Michael L. Johnson (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1985) 38-64; and "Textshop for an
Experimental Humanities," Reorientations, eds. Bruce Henricksen and Thais E. Morgan
(Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1990) 113-132. See also the "Discussion" that follows
the reprint of "Grammatology (in the Stacks) of Hypermedia, a Simulation: or, When Does a
Pile become a Heap?" Literacy Online, ed. Myron Tuman (Pittsburg: University of
Pennsylvania Press, 1992) 159-164.

38 As Ulmer writes, "In the process [of expanding images of quotidian objects like a postcard, an
unlaced shoe, etc. into models for writing], he [Derrida] reveals a simplicity, an economy,
underlying the so-called esotericism of intellectual discourse which, if properly tapped, could
eliminate the gap separating the general public from specialists in cultural studies" (Applied
Grammatology xii). While such a goal of "democratization" may come across as a lofty one —
and one perhaps fraught with ideological traps— the example of undergraduate success that I
described seems to offer some hope for making a writing based upon poststructural principles
accessible to the "non-expert."

41

Ultimately, Ulmer's goal is to make theory a potential hobby that any-
one can adopt. One can see this in his work-in-progress entitled the "Theory
Hobby Handbook," three of the lessons of which have appeared in print.39
Craig Saper, guest editor of the special issue of Visible Language in which
"Lesson Five" appears, writes about this aspect of Ulmer's grammatological
approach:

Gregory Ulmer exposes the process of making knowledge
specialized and unreceivable. In this way, he does not abide by
traditional pedagogy's separation between the popular and the
theoretical or the instant and the accumulated. This orientation
of theory toward thought rather than information allows us to
translate a specialized knowledge into a popular idiom. (390-91)

As Ulmer himself writes in "Lesson Ten," "Anyone can make a theory, when

theory is approached as a craft rather than as a specialty for experts" (85).

While the stated goal is for "anyone" to make a theory, Ulmer's work

occurs within the academy and so is directed specifically toward students.

Here we see the pedagogical emphasis of the grammatological approach, and

this becomes a key component differentiating Ulmer's use of poststructural-

ism from Goldberg's. Goldberg's work, at least in Voice Terminal Echo,

"concerns matters of critical practice," thereby attempting to inaugurate

change at the institutional level; Ulmer's work, on the other hand, while also

gesturing toward institutional change at the level of academic and scholarly

practice40, wishes to revolutionize the scene of pedagogy as well. This

39 "Lesson Five" appears in Visible Language 22 (1988) 399-422 (a special issue entitled
"Instant Theory: Making Thinking Popular"), "Lesson Eight" appears in Art and Text (Fall
1990), and "Lesson Ten" appears in Exposure 28 (1991) 85-90.

40 Ulmer's two major books, Applied Grammatology: Post(e)-Pedagogy from Jacques Derrida to
Joseph Beuys, and Teletheory: Grammatology in the Age of Video, are concerned with, among
other things, changing the way scholars in the humanities conduct their work. Applied
Grammatology works to cull the twentieth century experimental arts for alternative pedagogic
strategies: "The task of applied grammatology is to introduce this [picto-ideo-phonographic]
Writing into the classroom (and eventually into research communication in the form of video
tapes)" (242). Though Applied Grammatology primarily focuses on the pedagogic level of

42

dissertation follows Ulmer in this respect: it explores the possibilities not
only of doing serious academic research in hypertext and hypermedia formats
and how such writing can change what our discipline calls research but also
of how students might write about the Early Modern period in hypertextual
formats.

The "New Historicism" of Grammatology
Though I have discussed Jonathan Goldberg in the above section pri-
marily as a deconstructive critic, he has done work that has been labeled in
critical articles as "New Historicist." Perhaps this label comes from his review
essay published in English Literary History entitled "The Politics of
Renaissance Literature: A Review Essay," which Montrose writes is one of
two "influential and generally sympathetic early surveys /critiques of New
Historicist work."41 More likely, however, the title comes from his work in
James I and the Politics of Literature: Jonson, Shakespeare, Donne, and Their
Contemporaries, the publication of which followed shortly after the review
article.42 The confusion, if it could be called this, is appropriate in that the

applying grammatology, of introducing into the classroom the "picto-ideo-phonographic
Writing" Ulmer sees Derrida using, Teletheory begins the discussion of introducing this
Writing into academic research, ending with an experimental research project. Ulmer himself
says in an interview that "When I finished Teletheory I was surprised by the extent to which
it is a sequel to the first book [i.e. Applied Grammatology ]" (9). "The Making of 'Derrida at
the Little Bighorn': An Interview," Strategies #2 (1989), 9-23.

41 See "Professing the Renaissance: The Poetics and Politics of Culture," 32, note 7. While
Goldberg is certainly kinder to Montrose and Greenblatt than he is to Fredric Jameson and to
those practicing "older modes of criticism" (538), he does comment upon various shortcomings of
the method. See "The Politics of Renaissance Literature: A Review Essay," ELH 49 (1982),
514-542.

42 This title is grouped with the more "consistent" New Historicists (like Montrose and
Greenblatt) in various disparaging assessments of the New Historicist method. Alan Liu, for
instance, includes it in a list of "examples of such paradigmatic or 'anecdotal' openings, which
since the time of Howard's essay have become a favorite stalking-horse for readers critical of
the New Historicism" ["The Power of Formalism: The New Historicism," ELH 56 (1990), p. 757
note 2]. Christopher Kendrick, too [in "Anachronisms of Renaissance Postmodernism: On the
Textuality Hypothesis in Jonathan Goldberg's Voice Terminal Echo, " Boundary 2 15

43

New Historicism is known to result from a poststructural approach to the his-
toriographical study of Renaissance texts.43 Montrose calls it a

(Spring/Fall 1988), 239-69], writes of "the exemplar]/ quality of Goldberg's criticism, which
has worked both sides — philosophical and culturalist — of the divide opened up by the
textuality hypothesis, and participated in both the 'New Historicist' and deconstructive
tendencies that characterize much recent Renaissance criticism" (240). And even as late as the
Winter 1990 issue of New Literary History, we see Goldberg defending himself against the
attack of Richard Levin's "Unthinkable Thoughts in the New Historicizing of English
Renaissance Drama," in a special issue on "New Historicism, New Histories and Others"
which produced quite a heated exchange among the participants.

43 There is some debate— or disagreement — over the precise relationship between
deconstruction and New Historicism. Joel Fineman, for instance, equates the two critical
approaches in terms of their attention to the "textuality" of their texts (see his essay "The
History of the Anecdote: Fiction and Fiction" in The New Historicism, 65, note 6), while
Howard Felperin distinguishes New Historicism as a contextual approach from deconstruction
as a textual approach ["It is, rather, because post-structuralism, in both its contextualist (or
neo-historicist) version and its textualist (or deconstructive) version, is not, philosophically

speaking, a 'realism' at all but a 'conventionalism. Making it 'neo': the new historicism and

Renaissance literature," Textual Practice 1 (1987), 263.]. Liu, on the other hand, writes of New
Historicism as in between these two categories: "Fearing total commitment to either contextual
or textual understanding, it pauses nervously in between" (768, note 62). Gayatri Chakravorty
Spivak views conflict between the two and attributes this to a turf battle ["As I believe
Derrida himself surmised at the conference, the conflict between New Historicism and
deconstruction can now be narrowed down to a turf battle between Berkeley and Irvine, Berkeley
and Los Angeles" ("The New Historicism: Political Commitment and the Postmodern Critic,"
The New Historicism 278)], and Stanley Fish views the dilemma of New Historicism, which
on the one hand undermines the ability to know the past except through the filter of the
present and on the other hand wants to assert a particular kind of knowledge about the past as
being true, as "a tension between the frankly political agenda of much New Historicist work
and the poststructuralist polemic which often introduces and frames that same work"
("Commentary: The Young and the Restless," 304). Finally, Stephen Greenblatt seems to want
to distance his practice from poststructuralism as he situates himself "in relation to Marxism on
the one hand, and poststructuralism on the other" ("Towards a Poetics of Culture" 1-2). He
finds that in both (represented by Fredric Jameson in The Political Unconscious and Jean-
Francois Lyotard in "Judiciousness in Dispute or, Kant after Marx") "History functions ... as a
convenient anecdotal ornament upon a theoretical structure, and capitalism appears not as a
complex social and economic development in the West but as a malign philosophical principle"
(5). Greenblatt's assumption here is that any single theory cannot fully describe something as
complex as capitalism: "I propose that the general question addressed by Jameson and
Lyotard— what is the historical relation between art and society or between one institutionally
demarcated discursive practice and another? — does not lend itself to a single, theoretically
satisfactory answer of the kind that Jameson and Lyotard are trying to provide" (5). This,
then, justifies the theoretically eclectic approach of the New Historicism.

44

"poststructuralist orientation to history," the various modes of which "can be
characterized by ... a shift from History to histories."44

It can be difficult to talk about the way that New Historicism manifests
poststructural theory in its approach to the Renaissance simply because it does
not have an established theoretical practice to which one can point. This defi-
ciency is even admitted by its most celebrated practitioners and apologists.
Greenblatt, for instance, quite frankly confesses to this in the inaugural essay
of the anthology The Neiu Historicism :

One of the peculiar characteristics of the 'new historicism' in
literary studies is precisely how unresolved and in some ways
disingenuous it has been — I have been — about the relation to
literary theory. On the one hand it seems to me that an
openness to the theoretical ferment of the last few years is
precisely what distinguishes the new historicism from the
positivist historical scholarship of the early twentieth century. . .
. On the other hand the historicist critics have on the whole
been unwilling to enroll themselves in one or the other of the
dominant theoretical camps.45

Montrose, too, makes the same kind of statement in the essay that follows

Greenblatt's in the same anthology:

In the essay of mine to which I have already referred, I wrote
merely of a new historical orientation in Renaissance literary
studies, because it seemed to me that those identified with it by
themselves or by others were actually quite heterogeneous in
their critical practices and, for the most part, reluctant to theorize
those practices. ("The Poetics and Politics of Culture" 18)

44 "-The Poetics and Politics of Culture," 20. If the New Historicism is a "poststructural"
history, then Goldberg's later work in Writing Matter: From the Hands of the English
Renaissance might be called "New Historicist." But he takes great pains to establish and
carry out a "deconstructive history" which avoids the "vulgar concept of time" which
linearizes history, a problem he found with the kind of historicizing Greenblatt does in
Renaissance Self- Fashioning: "To label history in hindsight means to narrativize history in a
certain way, to view its course as linear and teleological and to assume that one can read back"
("The Politics of Renaissance Literature" 534). Others have found this tendency in New
Historicist work, as will be seen. So there appears to be a rift in the field of "poststructuralist
history," thereby problematizing the use of that label.

45 "Towards a Poetics of Culture," 1-14.

45

And in his survey of Renaissance New Historicist scholarship, which claims
to be "an Apology or apologetics for the New Historicism complete with
incorporated criticisms" (771 note 95) and ends with a call for a full-scale the-
ory of New Historicism, Alan Liu writes, "in most works that follow a New
Historicist approach it ["the diverse body of structural or quasi-structural
thought" indicative of New Historicist study] is surprisingly underthought at
the theoretical level" It is, he later says, a "wonder-cabinet of ill-sorted
methods."46

Much discussion of the actual methods and implications of New
Historicism has occurred, so that there seems almost as much said about
New Historicist practice as there is actual New Historicist practice, both by
practitioners and commentators alike. 47 To the extent that those critical of
New Historicism's practices homogenize the varied approaches, they are able
to isolate themes or motives that recur.48 Rather than recount what has

46 See p. 743. In note 5 (758-59), Liu shows what the contents of this "wonder cabinet" are in an
extensive documentation of the theoretical sources of New Historicist vocabulary: "In the
main, the method bears the imprint of a massive borrowing from New Criticism . . . from
deconstruction . . . from 'dialectic' and its components . . . and from complementary terminologies
in Foucault, Geertz, and Althusser."

47 Besides the essays already mentioned by Alan Liu, Howard Felperin, Louis Montrose,
Stephen Greenblatt, Stanley Fish, Christopher Kendrick, Richard Levin, and Jonathan
Goldberg, see also Louis Montrose, "Renaissance Literary Studies and the Subject of History,"
ELR 16 (Winter 1986), 5-12; Jean E. Howard, "The New Historicism in Renaissance Studies,"
ELR 16 (Winter 1986), 13-43; and David Norbrook, "The Life and Death of Renaissance Man,"
Raritan 8 (1989), 89-110. Fish makes a similar comment concerning the essays anthologized in
The New Historicism: "For the most part (and this is a distinction to which I shall return)
these essays are not doing New Historicism but talking about doing New Historicism, about the
claims made in its names and the problems those claims give rise to ... " ("Commentary: The
Young and the Restless" 303).

48 As Montrose writes, "But neither has it become any clearer that 'The New Historicism'
designates any agreed upon intellectual and institutional program" ("The Poetics and Politics
of Culture" 18). He goes on to detail the conflicted terrain that "New Historicism" designates,
concluding that "Inhabiting the discursive spaces traversed by the term 'New Historicism' are
some of the most complex, persistent, and unsettling of the problems that professors of literature
attempt variously to confront or to evade . . ." (19).

46

already been more than adequately documented, I will instead try briefly to
describe the poststructural "sources" of the New Historicism and then go on
to discuss some of the most notable comments made concerning its virtues
and vices before proceeding to further delineate the grammatological pro-
gram in which I am engaged.

One concise statement of the poststructural paradigm useful for the
purpose of clarifying the poststructural sources of New Historicism can be
found in Roland Barthes' essay "From Work to Text."49 In this essay, which
serves as an inaugural enunciation of the changes undergone (and, in some
ways, still being undergone) in the "paradigm shift" from modernism to
postmodernism, Barthes invokes the etymological sense of "text" in working
to define "Text": it is a "weave of signifiers" (159) which is "woven entirely
with citations, references, echoes, cultural languages . . ." (160). The root of
text, a metaphor latent in the original Latin "texere" which could mean both
"to weave" as well as "to compose" (speech or writing), helps to define the
new poststructural sense of the pervasiveness of language as a determinant
feature structuring the way humans think. "The metaphor of the Text is that
of the network " (161), Barthes writes, and it is within the network of signi-
fiers that cultural agents are born and raised.50 The Text, that is, does not
refer to a single book or enunciation in the language (as the term "work"
does) but to the entire field of language itself: "the work can be held in the
hand, the text is held in language" (157). As such, distinctions between

49 In Image Music Text, tr. Stephen Heath (New York: Hill and Wang, 1977) 155-64.

50 Lacan is best known for formulating the sense of how cultural agents are "separated" from
their mothers by the "Name-of-the-Father/' that is, how the in(tro)duction into language
constitutes an entry into a cultural "field" of language governed by the "paternal signifier."
His work with linguistics in the area of psychoanalysis exemplifies the general way that
considerations of linguistics have infiltrated almost every field of study.

47

particular genres cannot be evaluatively hierarchized since they are all partici-
pants in the same textual field. As Barthes writes, "the Text does not stop at
(good) Literature; it cannot be contained in a hierarchy, even in a simple divi-
sion of genres. What constitutes the Text is, on the contrary (or precisely), its
subversive force in respect of the old classifications" (157).

It is this sense of text that New Historicists embrace in their approach to
the Renaissance. As critics like Howard Felperin and Alan Liu have noted,
New Historicists treat various kinds of texts in the Renaissance as being part
of a larger con-text which serves as a substrate of ideological axioms that find
expression in particular articulations.51 This justifies, for instance,
Greenblatt's celebrated glance in "Invisible Bullets" at Thomas Hariot's A
Brief and True Report of the Nezv Found Land of Virginia — one of the vari-
ous travelogues representing the "New World" inhabitants — as a way of talk-
ing about Shakespeare's history plays, or his exploration of the reiterations by
the culture of the important elements of the Bower of Bliss episode in The
Faerie Queene 52 Letters, travelogues, diaries— texts not considered "literary"
in the more traditional sense of that term— become loci for the kind of cul-
tural production that critics more typically look for in canonical authors like

51 Alan Liu, in fact, suggests at the end of his powerful critique of the New Historicist
methodology (or lack thereof) that: "That which needs to be unthought, in other words, is the
very concept of the 'text' itself" (756). His portrayal of the New Historicist as a postmodern
intellectual so embarrassed by his social and political impotence that s/he finds vicarious
reassurance in identifying with those Renaissance figures who subversively fight the
oppressive forces of monarchical rule — an account no less dramatic than the New Historicists
he critiques— ends with a call for a "New Historicist study of New Historicism" (752), "a full-
scale theory of New Historicism" (754), "a renewed rhetoric" (755), and a prophecy of a '"new
rhetorical historicism' now making its advent" (771, note 95)— i.e. an historicism that is active
in a rhetorical sense rather than being the passive hermeneutic practice that it is under the
present circumstances. I have John Murchek to thank for clarifying some of these issues for me.

52 For "Invisible Bullets," see Shakespearean Negotiations (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1988) 21-66. For the essay on Spenser's "Bower" episode, see Renaissance Self-
Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1980) 157-
192.

48

Shakespeare or Spenser. So the New Historicist tries to trace the "serial
movement of disconnections, overlappings, variations" that occurs within
the "field of the text" (Barthes, "From Work to Text" 158), and this helps to
explain the interdisciplinary, intertextual emphases that one embraces when
engaged in the New Historicist project.

Accompanied by this poststructural sense of textuality is the postmod-
ern penchant for the self-reflexive. No longer will work in the humanities
attempt to mimic the (questionable and questioned) status of the objective,
the claim to which the sciences used to boast; rather, it will foreground the
subjective, the subject's effect upon the object of inquiry. The "observer's
effect" is recognized and embraced whole-heartedly. Both Greenblatt and
Montrose openly admit to this: Greenblatt writes that "methodological self-
consciousness is one of the distinguishing marks of the new historicism in
cultural studies as opposed to a historicism based upon faith in the
transparency of signs and interpretive procedure" ("Towards a Poetics of
Culture" 12). Montrose acknowledges as well the cultural specificity of the
project, noting the inescapable nature of the observer effect: "The project of
the new socio-historical criticism is, then, to analyze the interplay of culture-
specific discursive practices — mindful that it, too, is such a practice and so
participates in the interplay it seeks to analyze."53 Methodological

53 Montrose in fact closes by admitting to having a purpose which grows out of this perspective:
"If, by the ways in which we choose to read Renaissance texts, we bring to our students and to
ourselves a sense of our own historicity, an apprehension of our own positionings within
ideology, then we are at the same time demonstrating the limited but nevertheless tangible
possibility of contesting the regime of power and knowledge that at once sustains and constrains
us" (31). While some have questioned the extent to which the New Historicism empowers its
students, many have noted the phenomenon that the New Historicism communicates more about
itself in the present, by means of using the past as a mirror, than it reveals about the
Renaissance. See, for instance, Alan Liu: "... the New Historicist interpreter is thus a subject
looking into the past for some other subject able to define what he himself, or she herself, is;
but all the search shows in its uncanny historical mirror is the same subject he/she already
knows: a simulacrum of the poststructuralist self insecure in its identity" (733); Howard
Felperin: "For all the Renaissance erudition in Greenblatt's work, its command of historical

49

self-consciousness, however, is not equivalent to a theoretical foundation

upon which such a method should be based, according to some critics.

Stanley Fish notes the peculiarly rhetorical quality of this notorious

maneuver:

Some New Historicists outflank this accusation [of doing what
they critique other "older historicists" for doing] by making it
first, and then confessing to it with an unseemly eagerness. In
this way they transform what would be embarrassing if it were
pointed out by another into a sign of honesty and methodolog
ical self-consciousness. (The New Historicism 306)

Fish proceeds to suggest that such a maneuver is an unnecessary escape, a
"false dilemma" that he attempts to reconcile in the writing of his essay. He
separates the general question of historical practice or procedure from specific
questions of historical inquiry to argue that the "observer effect" (to put it
briefly) does not change the fact that things happened, only the way we
perceive them to have happened. The New Historicism sometimes confuses
the two, Fish argues. When the "paradigmatic parergon" (to fuse the concepts
of Kuhn and Derrida) is challenged, "the result will not be an indeterminacy
of fact, but a new shape of factual firmness underwritten by a newly, if tem-
porarily, settled perspective" (308).54

detail, richness of peculiar anecdote and attentiveness to contemporary texts, it is his own
culture that he broods on and depicts. If we want to understand the historical nature of
Greenblatt's achievement, we must look finally beyond the Renaissance context he so
painstakingly constructs and into his own cultural and institutional context" (276); and David
Norbrook: "In an era of escalating competitiveness for academic posts in an increasingly
market-oriented career structure, academics are no longer allowed the luxury of an earlier
generation's idealization of the disinterested quest for truth, and it is not surprising that their
discourse should betray such pressures" (107-08). Liu even suggests that this feature should
become foregrounded as a primary part of a fully delineated theory of New Historicism: "A
concept with eminently academic overtones, 'acknowledgement' of the present's intervention in
the past should blossom into disciplined study. We should see our own prejudices and concerns
in such constructs as the 'Renaissance' ..." (753).

54 N. Katherine Hayles makes a similar argument in discussing gender encoding in the science
of fluid mechanics. She attempts to account for the reason that complex flows in hydraulics
were ignored (because unsolvable)— and their subsequently being gendered as feminine— by
examining the initial assumptions of the differential mathematics used to solve such

50

The assumption that Fish makes, enabling him to draw such a conclu-
sion, concerns the way that historical inquiry— or, for that matter, academic
research in general — is conducted. For Fish, one will not answer a specific
historic question differently if one believes that historical events are con-
structed as opposed to found, because the means of construction are similar:
historical narrative is still linear and tries to define cause-effect relationships,
drawing upon the epistemology of rationality and scientific inquiry.55 Fish
says as much soon after examining Jean Franco's anthologized essay on "The
Nation as Imagined Community":

Not that I am faulting Franco for falling into the trap of being
discursive and linear; she could not do otherwise and still have
as an aim (in her terms an allegorical aim) the understanding
— the bringing into discursive comprehension — of anything. In

equations. Before the advent of fractal geometry and chaos theory, complex flows were
considered aberrations, but now, within the new mathematical framework, scientists are
finding the complex and nonlinear to be the norm. Hayles' explanation is like Fish's in its
explanation of how conclusions can still be valid (like scientific laws, for instance) yet be in
conflict with other conclusions (for example, Newton's Laws of Gravity vs. Einstein's Laws of
Relativity). She writes, "It is not that the 'laws' are untrue, but rather that they represent
formulations which can be verified when one is standing at a certain position and looking at
things in a certain way. Despite their names, conservation laws and continuity principles are
not inevitable facts of nature but constructions that foreground some experiences and
marginalize others " (31, my emphasis). See "Gender Encoding in Fluid Mechanics: Masculine
Channels and Feminine Flows," Differences 4.2 (1992), 16-44.

55To repeat a line already quoted in note 40 from Jonathan Goldberg: "To label history in
hindsight means to narrativize history in a certain way, to view its course as linear and
teleological and to assume that one can read back" ("The Politics of Renaissance Literature
534). Liu also comments upon the point of narrativizing as a New Historicist habit: "One way
to approach the problem of New Historicist 'paradigms' might thus be to recognize that they
are first and foremost highly sophisticated exercises in storytelling" (767, note 55). His astute
comment holds significant intimations concerning the status of New Historicist practice as being
anything really new when the implications of being labelled "narrative" are considered. As
Jerome McGann (whom Liu refers to in the same footnote) writes, "In the discourses of criticism,
and most typically in philosophy and literary discourse, narrativized forms are so common
that their narrativity is often not even noticed" [Social Values and Poetic Acts: The Historical
judgment of Literary Work. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988) 133]. McGann
invokes Hayden White's question of what a non-narrative history would be and proceeds to
provide two models— what he calls "criticism as array" and "criticism as dialectic"— that
already exist and that can serve as alternatives to the ideological axiomatic inherent in
narrative's emphasis on continuity.

51

the end you can't "defy categorization," you can only categorize
in a different way. (312)

This is a critical point that must be highlighted, as it will serve as one major
crux of my argument: understanding, as we understand understanding, as
the paradigm that is currently being challenged understands understanding,
depends upon linearity for its epistemological underpinnings.56 Understand-
ing as it is used here by Fish implies the kinds of comprehension that are
figured in the metaphors of seeing as understanding, grasping or
apprehending as comprehending, of theoria and "idea" as words
etymologically rooted in the sense of sight. And he is right: within this
framework, this paradigm, even New Historicists committed to engaging a
poststructural practice cannot help but be "discursive and linear."57

The grammatologist would agree with Fish's criticism but would work
to put his understanding into a perspective informed by the history of com-
municative technologies and of the practices that institutions adopt in
employing these particular technologies. Along with Derrida, as the primary
exemplar of the historical grammatologist in his earlier, more traditional
work (when compared to works such as The Post Card and Glas, for
instance), the theoretical grammatologist views the discourse of rationality as

56Disciplines that are currently challenging epistemological assumptions include
poststructural philosophies, theories of chaos, fractal geometry, cognitive science and neural
network research. Each of these emphasizes non- or multi-linearity as fundamental to its
approach.

57Hayles begins her essay on "Gender Encoding in Fluid Mechanics" by discussing the
differences between Donna Haraway and Luce Irigaray in their approach to writing about the
sciences. The fundamental difference is that Haraway's arguments "challenge scientific
objectivity from within the rules of the game . . . Positioning oneself at the periphery [as
Haraway does] is not the same, however, as leaving the game altogether. Leaving the game is
the move Irigaray makes . . ." (18-19). She later characterizes Irigaray's discourse as being
"fractured, elliptical, nonlinear " (19, my emphasis). This is, in part, the goal of the
grammatologist as well: to escape the game, the game of narrative criticism that only adds
more stories to the overstuffed shelves of libraries, a game which engages the ideology of
continuity and linearity. But the new game is not supposed to be so intimidating (as is
Irigaray's) that nobody will want to play.

52

being part of the "epoch of logocentrism," an epoch governed by the meta-
physics of presence that Derrida sets out to undermine, and s/he wishes to
contribute to the kind of "meta-rational" thinking that the poststructural
philosophers are forecasting as an effect of their work. One might even be
inclined to call grammatology a kind of "new historical" approach.

As such, it shares certain qualities with the New Historicism as delin-
eated above. Like the Renaissance New Historicists, the grammatologist will
work to establish a self-conscious relationship to the past and to past practices
in the history of reading of writing, but its purpose of doing so is to seek
potential alternatives to current rhetorical practices. Writing was not always
entirely alphabetic, with pages and pages of straight text, but in fact
incorporated imagery as mnemonic and/or decorative devices, as in the
emblem books of the Renaissance or the illuminated manuscripts of the
Middle Ages. Derrida himself has sung the praises of the hieroglyph, a kind
of writing that he claims can be multilinear in its signifying practice. The
grammatologist will cull from these and other past writing practices strategies
for writing in the multilinear formats of the electronic media. In the process
of doing so, s/he will self-reflexively discuss, in the manner of Montrose and
Greenblatt, the current institutional practices— with an emphasis more on
how they have come to be and how they affect perceptions of subject
positioning than on the relative power(lessness) of the academic with a
"frankly political agenda" (as Fish says) — as well as the historical contexts of
those past institutional practices being drawn upon analogically as s/he begins
to invent rhetorical practices for the electronic era.

Grammatology in the age of the Early Modern period will differ from a
strictly New Historicist practice, however, in that it has a theoretical position
that one can locate, and part of the purpose of this dissertation will be to

53

delineate, exemplify, and enact this theoretical practice as it would be applied
to the Early Modern period. While it is perhaps just as vague as the New
Historicists' articulation of their theoretical grounding to say that gramma-
tologists draw upon "twentieth century French literary theory/ philosophy" as
a theoretical basis, they desire not to engage in the debates over interpreta-
tions of these writers as much as they wish to look to them as models for how
to "write" electronically. This may be taken as a polite sidestepping of signifi-
cant issues, but they do not define grammatology in a way that requires
critique and therefore see it as being outside of this realm, insofar as engaging
in such debate can be taken up as a primary focus for academic work. For the
grammatologist does not wish to fall into the same trap that Fish claims the
New Historicists' did; that is, rather than continue in the realm of
hermeneutics, of interpretation and description, the grammatologist seeks to
cultivate an heuretic approach, one which does not necessarily entirely
abandon the hermeneutic but which does not privilege it either, as s/he
works to invent heuretically the new practices for an electronic age.58

To cultivate such an approach will be to escape (to whatever degree it is
possible) the linear, rational, narrativizing of most current critical practice in
order to elaborate a more richly specified practice of the meta-rational.
Grammatological practice will invent, that is, the practice of invention —

58 Ulmer might not call his work newly historical but newly "mystorical," as he invents a new
genre called the "mystery," the title of which intends to parody "history" and juxtapose
against the obvious patriarchal pun a rubric for this particular heuretic work in Teletheory.
He himself writes about the necessary suspension of the hermeneutic impulse in order to allow
for the heuretic, inventive process to occur. As he notes, the interpretive process can come
afterwards: "The mystery learns from the psychoanalytic interview the strategy of suspending
critical analysis, temporarily, in order to bring into appearance, into representation, the
pattern that inevitably arises when texts are juxtaposed. 'Derrida at the Little Bighorn' is
classified as a 'fragment' in Teletheory because it remains to be interpreted. It was generated
heuretically by juxtaposing the three discourses that constitute my 'life story.' In fact, the
main purpose of this interview is to begin the interpretive process" ("The Making of 'Derrida at
the Little Bighorn': An Interview" 13).

54

insofar as invention is a metarational process — and will work to institute a
pedagogy that can teach this practice to those unacquainted with the difficult
poststructural philosophies upon which it is grounded. Before beginning to
do so, however, before beginning to derive ways of composing in the new
medium of hypertext from the sixteenth century, I must provide more
groundwork in the next chapter by situating grammatology in the recent
orality versus literacy debates, looking especially at Jonathan Goldberg's
negotiation of that debate in Writing Matter: From the Hands of the English
Renaissance, as well as point to what precisely in the Early Modern period
can yield to a grammatological look by considering two histories of the period,
The Art of Memory by Francis Yates and Ramus, Method, and the Decay of
Dialogue by Walter Ong. Such a consideration will identify the sixteenth
century as a site of educational transition caused in part by technological
change, and will end with a preliminary consideration of Spenser as a writer
in the midst of this transitional moment who was affected by the educational
changes that took place.

CHAPTER 2
GRAMMATOLOGY IN THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY

This, I believe, is one of the earliest examples of the extreme
fascination with deploying words in a kind of abstract space which was
to be a characteristic of the Ramist age, and which is still so much a part
of us that we can hardly realize it has an origin and a history.

— Walter Ong

We choose our past in the same way that we choose our future.

— Hayden White

One goal of historical exploration in a grammatological project is to
understand the extent to which current institutional practices are cultural, to
understand, that is, that they have been invented at some point in history.
Such is the motivation behind Ong's work on Ramus, as he writes in the
above quotation; as such, his work engages in a grammatological exploration
which examines the effects of a particular technology of the word — the print-
ing press — upon the contemporaneous practices of rhetorical oratory. If the
outline — the "deployment of words in an abstract space" — was invented at a
particular moment in history, then knowing of its status as invention gives
us the option of continuing its usage or inventing new practices. Ong enjoins
us, then, to become aware of the origins of our current practices so that we are
not bound unconsciously to employ methods that may no longer be suitable
to the new media now available. Grammatological deconstruction, it could
be argued, works in a similar way: it identifies the metaphors underlying

55

56

certain "concepts we live by" so that we can consider alternatives, thereby
empowering us in our use of language.1

My primary purpose in this dissertation, then, involves the question of
hypertext composition, of how this new electronic medium might be used
within the educational institution by both scholars composing academic
articles about poets like Edmund Spenser and English instructors training
students to write about and with literature in a hypertext program like
Storyspace. This chapter plays the role of examining the history of peda-
gogical practices as they existed during the transitional period spanning the
Middle Ages and the Early Modern period. Knowledge of how pedagogical
practices changed then can help current pedagogical reformers generate
innovative instructional curricula by providing an understanding of both the
dynamics involved in a period of transition and the defining characteristics of
the print and electronic apparatuses. Such knowledge, I hope to show by the
end of this dissertation, can be most fruitful in negotiating our current
transitional shift. After providing a brief history of sixteenth-century
pedagogical practices and demonstrating how the printing press was one of
the central causes of the shifts in educational methods, I look at the work of
Edmund Spenser as a representative example of one writer in the midst of
these changes. The chapters following this preliminary groundwork will

h allude in this sentence to Lakoff and Johnson's Metaphors We Live By, and intend by doing so
to suggest that their work provides a model for the work of deconstruction. Early in the first
chapter of the book, the authors present an example of one pervasive metaphor we live by —
"argument is war" — and then proceed to suggest how difficult it would be to conceive of
argument in terms of an alternative metaphor: "Try to imagine a culture where arguments are
not viewed in terms of war. . . . Imagine a culture where an argument is viewed as a dance, the
participants are seen as performers, and the goal is to perform in a balanced and aesthetically
pleasing way" (4-5). Implicit in this suggestion is the potential that deconstruction has for
empowering us — to the extent that we can be empowered — by providing alternatives and
choices. Ultimately, though, the poststructuralist knows that one is confined to work within
language, unlike those literary critics who believe that language is merely a transparent
medium to a meaning that transcends the language itself.

57

then explore what I have learned about hypertext composition from the
sixteenth century and apply this learning in solving the problem of how to
compose in hypertext in a manner that exploits its full potential for
communicative efficacy.

The task of writing a history, though, is not without its problems, since
the discipline of history, as of late, has come under attack. It is no longer
viewed as the unproblematized revelation of the past, but is now seen to be
mediated by language and by language-users. The notion of the "observer
effect," while originating in anthropological study or perhaps even in such
scientific thought-experiments as Schrodinger's Cat, quantum mechanics or
relativity, has colored the methodological strategies of the liberal arts and
social sciences as well. The conclusions of Hayden White are now well-
known, conclusions which clarify the extent to which histories are literary
constructions, interpretations framing a set of facts. As he writes, "But in
general there has been a reluctance to consider historical narratives as what
they most manifestly are: verbal fictions, the contents of which are as much
invented as found and the forms of which have more in common with
their counterparts in literature than they have with those in the sciences."2

While White's call for historiological sophistication is specific to the
discipline of history, his call to action is similar to Ong's in that it requires

^In Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins UP, 1978,
82. Elsewhere, White writes of the "burden of history" as being the need to identify how
history itself was invented at a particular point in history, how it was a cultural phenomenon:
"Thus, historians of this generation must be prepared to face the possibility that the prestige
which their profession enjoyed among nineteenth-century intellectuals was a consequence of
determinable cultural forces. They must be prepared to entertain the notion that history, as
currently conceived, is a kind of historical accident, a product of a specific historical situation,
and that, with the passing of the misunderstandings that produced that situation, history
itself may lose its status as an autonomous and self-authenticating mode of thought. It may
well be that the most difficult task which the current generation of historians will be called
upon to perform is to expose the historically conditioned character of the historical
discipline ..." (29).

58

historians of any discipline to consider the invented nature of the discipline
itself. The implications of his claims extend, therefore, to historical explora-
tion in any discipline, but especially to literary criticism, as so much of its
endeavor involves history. Jerome J. McGann comments on the extent to
which an "ideology of continuity" in narrativized literary histories governs
the sphere of literary criticism: "If one is interested in critical knowledge, one
has to be wary of this impulse to generate continuities. ... In the discourses of
criticism, narrativized forms are so common that their narrativity is often not
even noticed."3 McGann calls attention, like Ong and White, to what is
forgotten or overlooked in our current practices, and therefore his work, in
that it looks to identify the origin of a specific cultural behavior within an
invisible ideology, qualifies for the title of "cultural criticism" as well.

The work of scholars like Jack Goody, Walter Ong, and Eric Havelock,
who could be called "grammatologists"— historians of reading and writing
practices — has recently come to be scrutinized by cultural critics who find in it
the tendency to generate continuities in the historical movement from orality
to literacy. Before proceeding to explore the sixteenth century for the ways in
which some institutional practices were abandoned and others were initiated,
I must first discuss the debate over the history of orality and literacy in order
to situate grammatology within this debate and to show how grammatology
can resolve the problems that Goody, Ong, and Havelock pose for a gram-
matological representation of history. Insofar as this dissertation is a his-
torical exploration of past reading and writing practices, of past strategies for

3 Social Values and Poetic Acts: The Historical Judgment of Literary Work. Cambridge:
Harvard UP, 1988, 132-3. McGann proceeds to offer alternatives to narrativizing for historical
representation.

59

"information storage and retrieval"4 as they have been carried out in oral and
literate cultures, I am writing the next chapter in this history, the chapter
concerning the move from literacy to "computeracy." The goal, ultimately, is
to work toward deriving scholarly and pedagogical strategies for information
storage and retrieval in electronic media based on past practices of building
memory palaces that, as I intend to show, are more suitable for electronic
dispositio than current literate or "book" strategies.

The Orality-Literacy Debate

The scholarship surrounding questions of oral cultures and how such
cultures compare to literate cultures has become quite extensive in recent
decades, so much so that Cambridge University Press has instituted a series of
books entitled "Cambridge Studies in Oral and Literate Culture." Such schol-
arship explores a number of different aspects of the problem, from the points
of view of various disciplines: anthropological studies of tribal African cul-
tures, historical studies plotting various points along the line marking the
transition from strictly oral practices to current literate practices, sociological
studies describing the effects of writing upon interpersonal relationships.

4By offering this potentially reductive equation of reading and writing practices with the
notion of "information storage and retrieval," I do not intend to overlook the ways that
poststructuralism complicates and problematizes the whole notion of reading and writing as
processes controllable by an author. In one sense, the phrase captures the implied logocentrism
in the rhetorical tradition of the commonplaces, which identify topics of various subject
matters as being located in certain places that can be plumbed for the purpose of making an
argument. But information here must be understood as any form of textuality in the broadest
sense of the term, such that the information that a writer stores in the form of narrative or epic
poetry (or any other form, for that matter) may be unconscious representations of pervasive
cultural norms that the writer unwittingly manifests in the writing. The mere act of storing
information does not, of course, assure its accurate and immediate retrieval, even when it is
within an individual's own esoteric mnemonic system. Given the characteristics of signs that
deconstructionists recognize, a text of "stored information" might be retrieved differently by
different readers; information perhaps unknown to the author might thus be released at a later
point in time. A poststructuralist critique of the logocentric topology of the memory palace,
taking into account these issues, is to come in chapter five.

60

While much data were gathered on these and other topics, only recently have
the methodology and assumptions governing these studies come under ques-
tion. The "debate," then, concerns the extent to which some of these scholars
have succumbed to an ideological bias which enables them to conclude that
literate culture is superior to or more advanced than "primitive" oral
cultures.

The central question of the debate as I see it is as follows: does alpha-
betic literacy inherently change the capability or the capacity of the mind to
think? Each of the three grammatological scholars mentioned, Ong,
Havelock and Goody, have all been guilty of making this claim in their work,
overtly suggesting in the process that this change makes the literate
cognitively advanced or superior. Ong, for instance, defining writing as a
"technology of the word," writes that "Technologies are not mere exterior
aids but also interior transformations of consciousness. . . ."5 Writing, in his
view, becomes indispensable to the kinds of progress that humankind has
managed to make since its advent: "Nevertheless, without writing, human
consciousness cannot achieve its fuller potentials, cannot produce other
beautiful and powerful creations. In this sense, orality needs to produce and
is destined to produce writing" (14-15). Havelock, too, sees the potential of
human rationality as being unlocked by writing. In his study of the effects of
the Greek alphabet upon communicative efficiency, he claims that literacy
literally changed our minds, allowing for logical thinking to emerge.
Havelock therefore suggests that all logical thinking was a result of Greek
alphabetic literacy.6 Goody as well, in his Domestication of the Savage Mind,

^Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word. New York: Routledge, 1982.

6 Havelock writes, in The Muse Learns to Write: Reflections on Orality and Literacy from
Antiquity to the Present ( New Haven: Yale UP, 1986), "A more radical question would be to
ask: May not all logical thinking as commonly understood be a product of Greek alphabetic

61

written in part as a corrective to Havelock's disregard of chirographic cultures
existing prior to Greek civilization, makes the claim that writing practices
such as the recipe, the list, and the table or chart helped in the "development
of cognitive structures and processes" which emerged "subsequent to the
advent of writing" (36-37).

Each of these writers views the technologies of writing as devices that
enable users to realize the "fully human" potentials of rational thought
which are characteristic of modern-day civilization. Assumed in this point of
view is the belief that the technologies of literacy — first the invention of the
vowel in Greek culture, the emergence of chirographic culture, and finally
the invention of movable type — are implicitly progressive, leading in an
inevitable "march of time" toward the development of individuality, democ-
racy, freedom. Literacy, in and of itself, comes to be a civilizing force: the
progressive technologizing of the word is an emancipatory development.7 In
a sense, proponents of this view hold that this process of technologizing is
naturally progressive, rather than seeing the assumption that literacy liber-
ates as a culturally imposed valuation.8

literacy?" (39). Later, he comments on how thought patterns themselves were changed: "A
special theory of Greek literacy involves the proposition that the way we use our senses and
the way we think are connected, and that in the transition from Greek orality to Greek literacy
the terms of this connection were altered also, and have remained altered, as compared with
the mentality of oralism, ever since" (98).

7Michael Warner challenges the conclusion that print enabled democracy to occur in his book
The Letters of the Republic: Publication and the Public Sphere in Eighteenth-Century America
(Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1990). He begins by citing a text by John Quincy Adams, in which
"Adams assumes that printing's purposes, uses, and meaning do not themselves undergo change.
The press is a powerful instrument for enlightenment precisely because its nature is not
contingent" (4). For the sake of his study, Warner believes that "we have to assume that the
purposes, uses, and meaning of print do change" (4).

^One can see the notion that literacy is naturally progressive in the advertisements for PLUS
("Project Literacy U.S."). In opposition to such programs of literacy, Freire's "Pedagogy of the
Oppressed" attempts to teach literacy in such a way that students become empowered to work
politically, an approach that suggests the teaching of literacy can somehow be opposed to the
goal of liberation.

62

This position has come under attack by such scholars as Brian Street

and Mary Carruthers. In Literacy in Theory and Practice, Brian Street

addresses the tendency described above as an ideological assumption; he sees

a problem in a position which represents technology as a neutral agent. The

appeal of this position, according to Street, is that it allows one to avoid the

charge of "discrimination" in the politicized sense most commonly used

today.

They can argue, whether implicitly or explicitly, that this new
version of the "great divide" — the division between literate and
non-literate — does not discriminate between cultures but simply
between technologies. Since technologies are "neutral," then no
aspersions are being cast on individual members of cultures
which happen to lack a particular technology and are thus taken
to lack certain intellectual advantages. . . . The suggestion is no
longer that a culture is intellectually superior, as earlier racist
theories had argued. Rather, it is claimed that a culture is
intellectually superior because it has acquired that technology.
(29)

Mary Carruthers has a similar problem with the haphazard use of the word

"technology." In The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval

Culture, in which she reveals medieval mnemonic practices to be a mixture

of oral and literate practices, Carruthers calls for care in the use of the term

technology, specifically care in the assumption that cognitive processes are

improved:

[S]ome modern historians of technology seem to assume that
there is a direct and simple correlation between the form some-
thing takes in writing and the way a person is able to think about
it, in the same way that a washing-machine's design determines
how clothes washed in it will be washed. The fashion for
defining writing as a technological innovation of the same sort
as television and the automobile, or the heavy plow and
moveable type, seems to me fraught with difficulties.9 (96)

^Carruthers is critical, among other things, of the reductive nature of labeling practices by
certain scholars involved in the orality-literacy debate. Ong, for instance, is guilty of
suggesting that memory is obliterated by the advent of literacy, that somehow human memory

63

Street labels this position that views technology as a neutral agent the
"autonomous model" of literacy, a position which privileges one particular
form of literacy as a universal practice, as the sole form of literacy.10 He
writes, "The model tends, I claim, to be based on the 'essay-text' form of
literacy and to generalise broadly from what is in fact a narrow, culture-
specific literacy practice" (l).11

As an alternative to the reductive autonomous model, Street offers
what he calls the "ideological model" of literacy, one which recognizes that
practices of literacy fulfill different purposes in different social contexts and

atrophies with the storage of information in written form. Her research in medieval mnemonic
practices, in which the act of writing involved an extensive process of inventio during which
the composer "discovered" the commonplaces stored in his/her memory, suggests that the book
in medieval culture helped to enhance individual memory but that it in no way obliterated
memory: "I think it will become clear in my discussion [of how one making a text proceeded]
that the terms 'oral' and 'written' are inadequate categories for describing what actually went
on in traditional composition" (194).

l°Street in fact suggests that this autonomous model is politically motivated in order to
perpetuate the current schooling practices: "[Ejducation systems are to be justified on the
grounds that they develop 'intellectual competence that would otherwise go largely
undeveloped.' They conjecture that literacy plays a central part in this process. The qualities
which they attribute to literacy thus take on the more general significance of justifying the
vast expense on western educational systems. Seen in this perspective, the claims already have
political and ideological significance . . ." (19).

1 Jonathan Goldberg, in Writing Matter: From the Hand of the English Renaissance (Stanford:
Stanford UP, 1990), locates the origin of this narrow conception of literacy— what he calls at
one point the "ideology of literacy" (205) — in sixteenth-century pedagogical practices. Like
Street's assessment of the politically motivated nature of the autonomous model, Goldberg
finds the aim of humanistic pedagogical programs, which focused on creating the notion of high
literacy by means of training in handwriting, to be the securement of employment in courtly
settings for intellectuals otherwise marginalized from such positions of power. Mulcaster's
pedagogical treatise The First Part of the Elementarie, for instance, attempted to define the
requirements for minimal literacy in such a way that the institution which he was inventing
was the only means of acquiring high literacy, the idealized italic style of handwriting.
Citing Francois Furet and Jacques Ozouf (Reading and Writing: Literacy in France from Calvin
to Jules Ferry ) in order to compare the situation in sixteenth-century England with their
assessment of the situation in France, Goldberg concludes with an assertion that undermines the
position of those upholding the autonomous model: "Hence, the spread of literacy always
correlates with social and economic inequalities. Literacy, they conclude, 'represented the key
to entry to the cultural model of the upper classes. Wherever we look, in every period, social
stratification presides over the history of literacy' (303). . . . Extensions of literacy redefine, but
do not abolish, structures of class" (48).

64

that it is necessary, therefore, to attend to the specific setting in which a par-
ticular form of literacy exists in order to identify how it works for that culture.
Carruthers's example of the washing machine is helpful here: rather than
viewing literacy as a "technology" that works in one way and one way only, as
those upholding the autonomous model assume, the ideological model
assumes that the way literacy "works" in a culture depends upon the culture
in which it is working: "The model stresses the significance of the socialisa-
tion process in the construction of the meaning of literacy for participants and
is therefore concerned with the general social institutions through which this
process takes place and not just the explicit 'educational' ones" (Street 2).

The emphasis here on the institutional makes Street's argument
similar to a grammatological one, which seeks, as part of its position, to
recognize the place of institutional practices in the employment of
technologies of communication. The notion of the "apparatus" does not
reduce literacy to a neutral technology but considers technology in relation to
the institutional practices governing its usage. The use of "technologies of
the word," that is, must be learned in specific social settings, institutional
settings, by individuals. Furthermore, the institutional training received by
students as a means of employing these technologies within particular social
settings results in an ideological formation that crystallizes into a particular
form of subjectivity.12 Havelock, for instance, writes of how a sense of
selfhood emerged subsequent to the invention of the alphabet, a recognition

12See, for one example of this phenomenon in the sixteenth century, Goldberg's third chapter:
"The individual produced by writing is not an individualized subject but one conforming to the
characters inscribed— the words and the letters of the copytexts clad in royalty" (164). See
also the fifth chapter: "Hence (as Cressy knows), statistics about literacy (including his own)
that depend on counting signatures err; moreover, as was emphasized earlier, they reproduce
the more modern notion of what constitutes literacy — the ability to sign the name and thereby
to produce the individual" (242-3).

65

that Ulmer includes as part of his definition of grammatology: "Subject
formation — subjectivation — is itself subject to invention."13 Subjectivity
thus becomes part of what defines Ulmer's notion of "the interactive matrix'
of the apparatus, which in his conception is constituted by technologies of
communication, institutional practices as well as subject formation.14
Grammatology, therefore, provides the theoretical framework for an
approach to the effects of language technologies which fits Street's
"ideological model," supplying with its definition of the apparatus what
Michael Warner, in The Letters of the Republic, believes has been lacking:
"But to my mind the material studied in this book derives much of its
interest from the reciprocal determination it shows between a medium and
its politics. This is a historical relation of causation that remains relatively
untheorized and resists the ways we usually narrate the past" (xii).15

13From Ulmer, Heuretics: The Logic of Invention, 92.

^Heuretics, 17. Havelock locates the emergence of selfhood in early Greek culture; in this
view, it has dominated in the apparatus of literacy for over 2500 years. While others locate
the moment of invention at other points (for instance, after the invention of moveable type), the
sense of the self as something invented is the common denominator. Contemporaneous with the
emergence of the new electronic media has been the poststructuralist questioning of the unified
self. See, as only one example of this, Foucault's conclusion that "As the archaeology of our
thought easily shows, man is an invention of recent date. And one perhaps nearing its end"
(The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences, New York: Vintage Books,
1970,387).

^Friedrich Kittler is said to have a conception of discourse which is similar to the
grammatological definition of apparatus, as one can see in David E. Wellbery's foreword to
Discourse Networks 1800/1900, trans. Michael Metteer and Chris Cullens (Stanford: Stanford
University Press, 1990): "While Kittler accepts the Lacanian dictum that the unconscious is
the discourse of the Other, he reads this formula from the standpoint of Foucault. That is to
say, the term discourse no longer refers, as in Lacan's rendering, to the linguistic and therefore
abstract notion of extended speech, but rather to positive modes of existence of language as
shaped by institutions of pedagogy, technical means of reproduction, storage and transfer,
available strategies of interpretation, and so on. Likewise the Lacanian Other is for Kittler
not the general and sovereign instance of the one Law, but rather (and again, with Foucault) the
network of forces and resistances, commands and addresses, that constitute historically specific
configurations of domination" (xxi). The "discourse network" as presented here is comparable to
Ulmer's notion of the "interactive matrix."

66

Given the debate as set forth above, however, it is clear that the notion
of "technology" must be clearly and carefully defined. While other possibili-
ties for defining this term have been opened up by such theorists as Theresa
De Lauretis — with her "technologies of gender" — and Deleuze and Guattari —
with their notion of the "abstract machine" — the grammatologist focuses on
technology as a tool of communication. This would include not only specific
technologies themselves (such as video, radio, typewriters, or printing
presses) but also other implements not normally considered technologies,
like a pencil, for instance, or a book. Conceiving of technology as a tool here
avoids the limited view of technology exemplified in Carruthers' "washing
machine" metaphor, which she employs to question the sense of a neutral
machine that only works in one way. A tool can be used in a variety of ways
for a variety of different reasons, though it may have one specified function,
for example the use of a screwdriver as a chisel: it will work as a chisel in
certain situations, but its intended function was to drive screws into wood.
This definition of technology, then, would allow for context-specific employ-
ment, for which Street's ideological model calls.

Carruthers offers an alternative term etymologically related to technol-
ogy: technique. She writes of these two almost interchangeably, as one can
see in the following passage, in which she warns about reifying technique and
refers to the abuse of this word in the same terms she uses when discussing
the reductive use of technology by other scholars:

Similarly, neither the prevalence nor the form of written
materials in a culture should, I think, be taken as any sure
indication of those people's ability to think in rational
categories, or of the structures those categories may take. I
am not suggesting that technique and technology have no
effect upon human culture; this study is concerned to
identify and describe a number of distinctive features in
medieval literary culture which are sometimes expressed in

67

particular techniques, such as page layout. But I try not to
reify technique, and in particular I think it very important to
recognize that the form in which information is presented to
the mind does not necessarily constrain the way in which such
information is encoded by the brain nor the ways in which it
can be found and sorted. (32)

A third possible synonym for defining the technology of communica-
tion in a grammatological fashion is to view it as a mnemonic prosthesis.
Grammatology might be considered as the study of the history of reading and
writing, or more precisely the study of how information is "stored and
retrieved" ("information" here not merely indicating neutral facts and figures
but also referring to cultural axioms concerning gender relations, class
distinctions, racial stereotypes, national mythologies, and any other
ideological assumptions that are woven within its text), of how societies
remember.16 Storage and retrieval can be seen as aspects of memory, and
memory becomes the crux: "Learning is regarded as a process of discovering
more effective, efficient, inclusive mnemonics — for memory, as Hugh of St.
Victor says, is the basis of learning" (Carruthers 106). Technology, then, can
be viewed as anything that improves the efficiency of memory, whether it be
a tool like a pencil to write a grocery list or a technique like page lay-out that
enhances recall of entire book pages.17 A library filled with books can be

16This latter phrase intentionally alludes to the title of Paul Connerton's sociological study
entitled How Societies Remember (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1989). The notion of
"information storage and retrieval" stems from Havelock's The Muse Learns to Write, in which
he writes, "Once the necessity to preserve cultural identity through linguistic storage, on the
one hand, and the oral character of early cultures on the other, are brought into conjunction and
viewed together, the question arises: How then, can orality store its information for re-use?
How can it preserve its identity?" (56).

17At the same time, caution still must be practiced in using the term efficiency to avoid
ethnocentric views of technological determinism. Even the notion of "artificial memory" or
mnemonic prosthesis must be carefully employed so as to avoid what Levi-Strauss warns about
in Tristes Tropiques : "One might suppose that . . . [t]he possession of writing vastly increases
man's ability to preserve knowledge. It can be thought of as an artificial memory, the
development of which ought to lead to a clearer awareness of the past, and hence to a greater
ability to organize both the present and the future. After eliminating all other criteria which

68

conceived of as a technology, when technology is defined as mnemonic pros-
thesis.18

With this sense of technology, then, I look in the next section at two
grammatological histories, Frances Yates' The Art of Memory and Walter
Ong's Ramus, Method, and the Decay of Dialogue, with the intent of explor-
ing how the sixteenth century was a transitional period for pedagogical prac-
tices, such that a different mnemonic system — the Ramist method of outlin-
ing— replaced the traditional mnemonic system of the memory palace. But
the memory palace, as I will show in subsequent chapters, is more amenable
to electronic media and will therefore provide a model for electronic
dispositio. This will be one part of the prolegomenon for an electronic
rhetoric, the second part consisting of specific strategies for writing within
hypertext.

Sixteenth-Century Mnemonic Practices

Writing of the effect of Hayden White's conclusions concerning histo-
riographical narrativization in the context of literary criticism, Jerome
McGann says, "White explores a type of critical narrative which he calls the
'narrativized' text, where the writer builds into the discourse an illusion

have been put forward to distinguish between barbarism and civilization, it is tempting to
retain this one at least: there are people with, or without, writing; the former are able to store
up their past achievements and to move with ever-increasing rapidity towards the goal they
have set for themselves, whereas the latter, being incapable of remembering the past beyond
the narrow margin of individual memory, seem bound to remain imprisoned in a fluctuating
history which will always lack both a beginning and any lasting awareness of an aim. Yet
nothing we know about writing and the part it has played in man's evolution justifies this
view" (298).

18In her textbook of rhetoric organized via the five parts of rhetoric, Winifred Bryan Horner,
in Rhetoric in the Classical Tradition (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1988), writes of libraries
as the repositories of cultural information: "Where classical rhetoric limited the study of
memory to cultivating the natural memory, modern rhetoric must consider memory in terms of
the resources available through books and databases . . ." (339).

69

which suggests that completion is inherent to the historical events rather
than to the narrative of those events" (Social Values and Poetic Acts 140).
Any past event or practice, then, is always open to recycling in a new
(historical) narrative that reinterprets the past in terms of the present. Such is
my purpose in this dissertation: to re-open the history of the memory palace,
which came to an apparent end in the sixteenth century, and remotivate its
mnemonics in the context of late twentieth-century technologies. My
purpose in this section will be to review the institutional changes in
pedagogical procedure which are said to have brought about the decline in the
use of the memory palace as a popular mnemotechnique. This review will
suggest that scholars and students responding to changes in communications
technology at the present moment can bring about its return. Insofar as the
changes in the sixteenth century were caused, in part, by the advent of a new
technology — the printing press — I will suggest that the recent advent of new
technologies, such as video, interactive multimedia, and virtual reality or
"cyberspace," will impose the same pressure upon the educational institution
to adapt to the changes with revised institutional practices. This dissertation,
ultimately, will offer some possibilities for such practices.

First, I will review the history of the memory palace. The legendary
origin of the mnemonic strategy of remembering images in particular
places — the fundamental principle of the memory palace — occurred at a ban-
quet given by Scopas. The poet Simonides, present at the banquet to enter-
tain the guests, was called outside by two men, presumably the twin gods
Castor and Pollux in praise of whom part of his songs were sung. During his
absence the roof caved in, killing all of the dinner guests and mangling them
beyond recognition. Simonides, however, was able to identify the guests, as
he had remembered the places at the table at which each guest sat. From this

70

experience he extrapolated the fundamental principle of the memory palace,
and so is said to have invented the art of memory.19

This story is often recounted in conjunction with discussion of the
fourth part of rhetoric— memoria. The three Roman sources for rhetorical
practice each include strategies for memorization based on Simonides' inven-
tion: Cicero's De oratore, Quintilian's Insititutio oratoria and the anony-
mous Rhetorica ad Herennium. The purpose of this discussion of memoria
was to present methods for memorizing speeches once written, for the most
effective means of delivery. As such, the focus of these early treatises
remained rhetorical, and its instruction remained confined to the improve-
ment of one's oratorical abilities.

A shift in emphasis occurs in the Middle Ages, when in the highly
Christianized context of the time, different goals were pursued by the institu-
tions of education. Yates locates the shift in a particular reading of Cicero's De
inventione:

That is to say, they [Albertus Magnus and Thomas Aquinas]
knew only the Ad Herennium on the artificial memory, and
they saw it, through a tradition already well established in the
earlier Middle Ages, in the context of the "First Rhetoric of
Tullius," the De inventione with its definitions of the four
cardinal virtues and their parts. Hence it comes about that the
scholastic ars memorativa treatises — those by Albertus Magnus
and Thomas Aquinas— do not form part of a treatise on rhetoric,
like the ancient sources. The artificial memory has moved over
from rhetoric to ethics. (57)20

19See Frances Yates, The Art of Memory (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1966) 1-2
for a detailed account of this moment.

20Yates qualifies this statement soon after by suggesting that the "ethical or prudential
interpretation" of the Art of Memory already existed in the Middle Ages and that Albertus and
Thomas were merely following suit. She then proceeds to trace the origin of this "momentous
transference," as she puts it, by looking at Boncompagno da Signa's pre-scholastic treatise, the
Rhetorica Novissima. See 57-60.

71

The same mnemonic strategies were applied to a different purpose: the
memorization of virtues and vices so as to keep monks focused on the
rewards of virtuous behavior and reminded of the punishments for bad
behavior. In this vein, Dante's Divine Comedy is possibly a poem based on
the Art of Memory.21

Another institutional force which maintained the need for memoriza-
tion concerned the new mendicant orders, members of which would preach
as they wandered as part of their service. Yates recounts Beryl Smalley's study
of fourteenth-century friars who memorized allegorical personifications of
the sins in order to facilitate recall of material for purposes of preaching. The
strategies offered in the various texts have their origins, Yates suggests, in the
practices of the classical Art of Memory.22 Furthermore, the dominant
instructional mode until the sixteenth century was the oral disputation, in
which degree candidates would have to engage to demonstrate their prowess
in arguing. "As late as Ramus' own day, (as John Standonck's 1503 statutes
for the College of Montaigu show), such disputations were the sole exercise
of all students."23 Those engaged in a disputation would not only need to
memorize their own portion of the dialogue but also needed to "store" in
memory the arguments of their opponents, so as to be able effectively to
refute those points.

21 "That Dante's Inferno could be regarded as a kind of memory system for memorising, Hell and
its punishments with striking images on orders of places, will come as a great shock, and I must
leave it as a shock. It would take a whole book to work out the implications of such an
approach to Dante's poem" (Yates, The Art of Memory 95).

22Yates suggests, too, that "The preference of these English friars for the fables of the poets as
memory images, as allowed by Albertus Magnus, suggests that the artificial memory may be a
hitherto unsuspected medium through which pagan imagery survived in the Middle Ages"
(99).

23 Walter J. Ong, Ramus, Method, and the Decay of Dialogue: From the Art of Discourse to the
Art of Reason, (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1958) 154.

72

These disputations occurred very frequently in the setting of a
medieval university. "Besides the types of disputation connected with the
'graduation' ceremonies of both bachelor and master, there were the frequent
disputation conducted by the master in his own classes."24 These would sim-
ply be questions posed by either the master or by a student, with the subse-
quent oral response. Another student, appointed as the "respondent," would
then summarize both the answers to the question and the objections raised.
In another, more common version of the disputation, known as "public and
'ordinary' disputations, the respondent and opponent were students or bache-
lors, while the one who summed up and gave the final solutions was the
master, who thus 'determined' the question" (Daly 157). At Oxford, for
instance, these were quite frequent: "in the medical faculty, the rules call for
weekly disputations, and in the faculty of arts the new master was to dispute
on every 'disputable day' for forty continuous days" (157). The disputation
was, in fact, considered to be one of the duties of a master or doctor, besides
the task of "professing."25

24Lowrie J. Daly, S.J. The Medieval University, (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1961), 156.

25While Daly provides useful general information about the university setting itself, Mary
Carruthers provides specific details about how mnemonics were taught to the students,
mnemonics specific to the memorization of written texts. For instance, in answering how
medieval bestiaries were used, she writes, "What the Bestiary taught most usefully in the long
term of a medieval education was not 'natural history' or moralized instruction (all instruction
in the Middle Ages was moralized) but mental imaging, the systematic forming of 'pictures'
that would stick in the memory and could be used, like rebuses, homophonies, imagines rerum,
and other sorts of notae, to mark information within the grid" (127). Other strategies, which
she recounts in detail, concern the use of "sets" of images students were assumed to have, such as
the alphabet, numbers, and the zodiac. These were deployed within a numerical grid system
imposed upon the book pages, a practice which was common: "There are a number of other
sources and practices current throughout the Middle Ages which indicate that both the
numerical grid system and mnemonic value of page layout were well known . . ." (95). These
methods are consistent with the practices presented in the classical rhetorics, but they
demonstrate practices taught to help students memorize written texts. As such, Carruthers
delineates a mixed practice, one that fuses oral and literate strategies.

73

But a gradual decline in the use of the medieval mnemonics occurred,
in particular the memory palace, for various reasons. For one, a complete text
of Quintilian's Institutio oratoria was discovered in the early fifteenth cen-
tury, so by the sixteenth century his version was available. This is an impor-
tant development because Quintilian is the only one of the three Latin
sources to criticize the efficacy of the memory palace, suggesting in its stead
the strict rote memorization that we are more familiar with today.
Furthermore, since Thomas Aquinas himself wrote of the Art of Memory,
the memory palace became associated with scholasticism, which was attacked
by humanist philosophers like Erasmus and Melanchthon.26

The practice of building memory palaces — in which loci were made
available for the placement of remarkable imagery that would stimulate one's
memory — did not, however, become completely discontinued but became
marginalized to the Neoplatonist movement, which adopted its mnemonics
for the purpose of enhancing the Hermetic philosopher's magical grasp over
nature. Much of Yates' work revolves around recounting the Hermetic and
Cabalist traditions as they are incorporated into the memory palace tradition
practiced by the Hermetic philosophers that she researches, especially
Giordano Bruno.27 While the Hermeto-Cabalist tradition may have been

26 As Yates writes, "The distinctly cool and Quintilianist attitude of Erasmus to the artificial
memory develops in later leading humanist educators into a strong disapproval of it.
Melanchthon forbids students to use any mnemotechnical devices and enjoins learning by heart

in the normal way as the sole art of memory Erasmus did not like the Middle Ages, a

dislike which developed into violent antagonism in the Reformation, and the art of memory
was a mediaeval and a scholastic art" (127).

27One area that Yates neglects is the use of the memory palace by the Jesuits in their
militaristic response, as the "shock-troops of the Counter-Reformation," to the successes of the
Protestant Reformation. We know that the memory palace was practiced among them from
Jonathan D. Spence's history of The Memory Palace of Matteo Ricci (New York: Penguin Books,
1984). Spence even provides an explanation for why the practices in this traditional art of
memory were particularly well-suited for the Jesuits: "This vivid restructuring of memory was
also a fundamental component of the edifice of discipline and religious training that the
converted Spanish soldier Ignatius of Loyola developed for the members of the Society of Jesus,

74

strong in the sixteenth century, it eventually becomes discounted by the end
of Bruno's life, resulting in his burning at the stake in 1600.28 Yates recounts
a debate which took place between a Brunian, Alexander Dicson, and a
Ramist disciple, William Perkins, in 1584. While the debate was ostensibly
about opposing arts of memory, it was, as Yates writes, "at bottom a religious
controversy" (267), and this is part of the reason why the Hermetic version,
perceived as subversive and pagan, failed to maintain any influence over
future mnemonic practices.29

At the same time that such religious and intellectual controversies
were playing themselves out, pedagogical changes were occurring, changes

which he founded in 1540; he had been marshaling his arguments in writing the early drafts of
the Spiritual Exercises" (15). The memory palace tradition was also useful, to be sure, in the
extensive rhetorical training that the Jesuits received, training which enabled them to go forth
and re-convert the Protestants to Catholicism in rhetorical street-fights. See Francesco C.
Cesareo, "The Collegium Germanicum and the Ignatian Vision of Education," The Sixteenth
Century Journal 24 (Winter 1993), 829-841 for an account of the Jesuit emphasis on winning back
those lost to Protestantism.

28In her book-length study of Bruno, Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition, Yates writes
of how Bruno was burned as an "impenitent heretic" (349). She writes of how "Bruno takes a
radical step, which puts him outside the pale of normal Christian Hermetism, by abandoning
the Christian interpretation, and above all, by going wholeheartedly for the magic as the
chief thing, the core of Hermetism" (230). The extent to which Hermetism did survive in that
period depended on how veiled its truly pagan origins were, or how convincingly a proponent
presented its interpretation as not being antithetical to a Christian vision, as in the case of Pico
della Mirandola. Yates demonstrates, in The Art of Memory, how Hermetism managed to
survive until the time of the scientific revolution, which she suggests was influenced in part by
Hermetic principles: "And such a study might demonstrate that all that was most noble in the
religious and philanthropic aspirations of seventeenth-century science was already present, on
the Hermetic plane, in Giordano Bruno, transmitted by him in the secret of his arts of memory"
(388).

29Evelyn Fox Keller writes of how alchemy, the practice and goal of hermetism, lost on
another front: that of science. She recounts the conflict between the Baconian and hermetic
conceptions of how humankind should relate to nature, finding the sexual metaphors that each
opposing side used to incorporate its attitude toward nature: "His [Bacon's] central metaphor-
science as power, a force virile enough to penetrate and subdue nature — has provided an image
that permeates the rhetoric of modern science. ... If the root image for Bacon was a 'chaste and
lawful marriage between Mind and Nature' that will 'bind [Naturejto [man's] service and
maker her [his] slave' ... the root image of the alchemists was coition, the conjunction of mind
and matter, the merging of male and female. As Bacon's metaphoric ideal was the virile
superman, the alchemist's ideal was the hermaphrodite." Reflections on Gender and Science,
(New Haven: Yale UP, 1985) 48.

75

caused by both internal institutional pressures and external technological
shifts. Within the institution, more and more emphasis was placed upon
writing as the oral disputation declined in its status as the sole means of
showing one's learning. The advent of a "curriculum" was part of the reason
for this trend. The current sense of "curriculum" as meaning the set of peda-
gogical tasks to be completed within a given period of time seems to have had
its origin in the late medieval /early modern university setting, and the
underlying metaphor of the "road race" (curriculum in Latin means "a con-
test in running") was as much a problem then as it is now. Ong writes of how
an element of discourse as simple as class discussion became abbreviated so
that the road race of curriculum could be run: "Even partial dialogue with
the class, in which the pupils volunteered questions or objections, was neces-
sarily severely restricted, or one would never get through the material at all"
(Ramus 155).

The move to a coverage model of education also encouraged stan-
dardization of education, such that teacher's guilds began to determine
guidelines for course content. This trend also affected the degree of orality in
the university setting, resulting in increased reliance upon writing. Again,
Ong is helpful here:

The normal-school tradition itself [a disputation-based
curriculum], however, had prepared the way for the humanist
assault on the oral disputation. Insofar as knowledge was
standardized by being put in the keeping of teachers' guilds,
where it inevitably became more and more a commodity, it
tended to retreat from the evanescent world of discourse (verba
volant ) to the more stable world of writing (scripta manent ).
(155)

The dreaded teacher's exam, which every new public school teacher must
pass before becoming a bona fide certified teacher, had its origins in this pro-
cess of standardization that the teachers' guilds enacted. This exam ensured a

76

degree of competence but at the same time shifted the conception of
knowledge to that of a commodity:

[KJnowledge naturally tended to be viewed less as a wisdom
transmissable only in a context of personal relationships than as
a commodity. It could be measured — indeed, had to be — which
meant that it could be manipulated in terms of quantitative
analogies. We have not yet arrived, but we are well on the way
to report cards. . . . (Ramus 152)

The problem of teaching complicated philosophy to young teenagers
also contributed to the institutional reshaping that participated in the decline
of discourse practiced within education. This in fact goes to the heart of Ong's
treatment of Ramus's educational reforms. As part of the historical ground-
work that Ong provides for demonstrating the conditions under which
Ramus revises the constitution of rhetoric and dialectic, he relates the process
of simplification that occurs for pedagogical purposes. This promoted the
transmission of less than accurate material and initiated the pairing-down
process that culminates in Ramus's revised logic.30 In fact, Ramus justifies
his "natural dialectic" by appealing to its practicality:

Ramus flaunts his reason for the superiority of this practical
analysis with a disconcerting frankness: it is the best possible
method for enabling the schoolboy to memorize the twenty-
eight lines of Ovid in question! .... Ramus' preoccupation with
dichotomization has its real origin largely in the pedagogical
appeal of the tidy bracketed tables of dichotomies which he

3°Ong writes of Peter of Spain, "Why is it that our manualist, moving through all this maze,
thrusts aside by a kind of sleight of hand all question of probability and regards the concern of
dialectic or logic to be certainties alone? Basically, because he is a manualist, supplying the
need for a handbook for the teen-age medieval student" (62). Later he writes of the same
phenomenon: "Not satisfied with equating dialectic and teaching, Melanchthon also must
solve problems external or peripheral to dialectic on a pedagogical basis. Thus, he defends the
long-standing distinction between dialectic which controls 'plain' speech and rhetoric which
controls 'ornamental' speech on the grounds that, while not necessarily accurate, the distinc-
tion must be held to because it is teachable. He is hewing here to the Agricolan line, for, when
Agricola had dismissed a logic of predication in favor of a topical logic, he too had done so
because the former is hard to teach and the latter easy" (Ramus 159).

77

studied in the printed commentaries and epitomes of Agricola's
Dialectical Invention. (194, 199)

Ultimately, this appeal to practicality proved to be the crucial blow in the
demise of the memory palace as a mnemonic strategy: because one had to
work at discovering visual puns to situate in carefully created places, often-
times generating elaborate and esoteric connections in the hope of stimulat-
ing the memory, the procedure seemed too complicated and unnecessary.
The Ramist dichotomies were arguably more efficient and less complicated.31

As the framework of grammatology suggests, though, institutional
changes were not the only factor involved. The new technology of the print-
ing press also aided in this process, in that it participated in fostering the
advent of the Ramist dichotomies. Ramus, of course, was not the first to fab-
ricate elaborate charts mapping the mind and its workings. But charts made
prior to the printing press were reproduced like all documents were before
the printing press: by hand. Besides the inaccuracies that such a procedure
promoted, oftentimes this process was tedious to say the least, as well as com-
plicated. With the new "age of mechanical reproduction" that the printing
press engendered, multiple copies of complicated charts like Ramus'
dichotomies could be reproduced with minimal inaccuracy. As Ong writes,
"The Agricolan and Ramist dialectic was to prove itself unexpectedly conge-
nial to printing techniques" (97). The value of Ong's thesis lies in his

31Of this Frances Yates writes, "Amongst the complexities of which Ramus made a clean sweep
were those of the old art of memory. Ramus abolished memory as a part of rhetoric, and with it
he abolished the artificial memory. This was not because Ramus was not interested in
memorising. On the contrary, one of the chief aims of the Ramist movement for the reform and
simplification of education was to provide a new and better way of memorising all subjects"
(232).

78

explanation of the power of the technology to initiate wide-reaching cultural
change — given the proper institutional setting.32

Insofar as the printing press was congenial to Ramism, it facilitated its
expansion as a mnemonic system. The printed book, too, helped contribute
to the decline of the memory palace, as the process begun in the Middle
Ages — the storing of information in book form — became that much more
easy.33 Mass production was now possible; no more did one have to wait for
a human hand to transcribe completely an entire tome. "The schematic lay-
outs of manuscripts, designed for memorisation, the articulation of a summa
into its ordered parts, all these are disappearing with the printed book which
need not be memorised since copies are plentiful" (Yates 124). This plenitude
was significant, as Carruthers indicates in speaking of why medieval scholars
required a good memory: "Scholars have always recognized that memory
necessarily played a crucial role in pre-modern Western civilization, for in a
world of few books, and those mostly in communal libraries, one's education
had to be remembered, for one could never depend on having continuing
access to specific material" (8). The need for a good memory was no longer as
urgent as it once was, and so the mnemonic practices that cultivated a phe-
nomenal memory were less and less engaged.

32The primary thesis Ong offers shows that the move away from oral discourse and toward the
more visual medium of writing helped to bring about the emergence of science: "In its long-term
effects, Ramism, with the topical logic which it exploits, is favorable to the emergence of
modern science, experiment included, because of the way it loosens up the field of knowledge in
encouraging visualist approaches to this field" (269).

33In distinguishing between "books" and "texts," Carruthers comes to define a book as a
mnemonic tool: "A book is not necessarily the same thing as a text. 'Texts' are the material out
of which human beings make 'literature.' For us, texts only come in books, and so the distinction
between the two is blurred and even lost. But, in a memorial culture, a 'book is only one way
among several to remember a 'text,' to provision and cue one's memory with 'dicta et facta
memorabilia.' So a book is itself a mnemonic, among many other functions it can also have" (8).

79

The irony in Ramus' aim to create a better way of memorizing with his
dichotomies becomes apparent: in promoting a written, visual form of
memory which serves as a mnemonic prosthesis on paper, he superceded the
more oral form of the memory palace, one in which human memory itself
was more directly engaged. The Ramist method institutes an age of rhetoric
or anti-rhetoric in which the latter two steps — memoria and pronuntiatio —
drop out of consideration, and memory in itself becomes incorporated in
writing. The resulting hybrid of memory and method — what Sharon
Crowley calls "the methodical memory" — can only be expressed in writing:

A written outline, then, was a graphic representation of the
categories contained in the memory. The discursive outline
simply was a graphic representation of the processes of analysis
and amplification. The workings of the methodical memory
could now be put on display for all to see!34

This state of affairs has developed over the centuries since the sixteenth cen-
tury, and only now, with the relatively recent advent of electronic and mass
media, is the hegemony of exposition being challenged. Barilli's diagnosis of
contemporary rhetoric suggests the need to reconsider rhetoric in light of
twentieth-century breakthroughs in communicative technology.

The current challenge, then, is to view the electronic media as
mnemonic prostheses, as new tools for storing information, tools which have
characteristics that differ from the book as a storage medium. I am claiming
that our discipline has much to learn from the sixteenth century concerning
the employment of a three-dimensional writing space such as the Storyspace
hypertext medium, specifically from the storage strategies of the memory

3477ie Methodical Memory: Invention in Current-! rational Rhetoric, 82. In Crowley's history
of the discipline of rhetoric and composition, she finds the five-paragraph theme to be the last
stage of an evolutionary trend that began with Ramus: "The five-paragraph theme was the
most thoroughgoing scheme for spatializing discourse that had appeared in rhetorical theory
since Peter Ramus' method of dichotomizing division rendered all the world divisible by
halves" (135).

80

palace as well as from the individual authors who were negotiating a time of
transition as fluid as ours is now. I will now consider from a grammatolog-
ical perspective the sixteenth-century context of Edmund Spenser, one of the
first "authors" to be paid as an author.

Spenser and the Memory Palace

Whether conscious or not, Spenser lived in a transitional period
during which mnemonic practices, pedagogical practices, political power
relationships, class relationships, and subjectivity were undergoing changes
that oftentimes were contradictory in their implications: the "secret" self
writing a variety of different signatures, the Protestant reformer employing
an iconographic mnemonic system,35 the impoverished sizar, with a
homosexual mentor, whose course of study and, consequently, his poetry
were affected, in part, by the advent of the printing press.36 The previous

35For an example of this phenomenon other than Spenser, see Catharine Randall Coats,
"Reactivating Textual Traces: Martyrs, Memory, and the Self in Theodore Beza's Icones
(1581)," Later Calvinism: International Perspectives, ed. W.Fred Graham (Kirksville,
Missouri: Sixteenth Century Essays & Studies XXII) 19-28. Beza, Calvin's friend, successor, and
biographer, wrote a text composed of many imaged representations of various confessors and
martyrs he wished to have remembered. Coats explores the conflicted forces which informed
the text's composition— some of them originating in the Protestant fear of the Art of Memory
and its iconic mnemonic — and suggests that Beza's self-revelation was his motivation: "By
incorporating images, Beza provoked an attack from the Jesuits, who accused him of succumbing
to the very idolatry Calvinists claimed to abhor. Beza's motivations in choosing to include
woodcuts must therefore be examined. I maintain that its effect was to produce a new form of
emblematic text, in which word and image both compete and conjoin to construct a living
portrait of the self: that of its author. . . . Through the selection, ordering, and exposition of his
material, Beza reveals, primarily, himself (20).

36Goldberg tells of Spenser's relationship with Harvey and how it reflected a mentor-student
relationship that goes back to classical Greece: "Within that spacing, which, for Elizabethans
like Spenser and Harvey, takes the historically specific situation of the apparatuses of a
homosocial pedagogy, the Spenserian career — in life, in letters — is launched" (Sodometries
80). Goldberg shows that the Renaissance approach to pedagogy is in this fashion traditional,
in that it establishes the student as one who identifies with the teacher. At the same time,
however, the kinds of changes that Ong reports in Ramus, and the political and religious
conflicts that figure in Ramus's pedagogical reformation, are working to bring about
institutional changes as well.

81

section of this chapter recounted the history of mnemotechnics as a set of
institutional practices that changed as a result of the effects of the printing
press, and, as the next section will show, Spenser's poetry reveals his
participation in the outgoing practice of the memory palace. The chapter to
follow will then explore how Spenser embraces the incoming practices of
print literacy and what the implications of this embrace are for the subsequent
development of the "mnemonics of literacy," as I shall call it.

It remains now to demonstrate how Spenser's allegorical impulse
shared in the tradition of the memory palace. The goal of returning to
Spenser as a grammatologist, at a time when allegory is on the rise again both
as a topic and as a practice in literary theory, at a time when the "electronic
word," to quote the title of Richard Lanham's recent book on "electronic
literacy," is as visual as it is verbal, will be to learn from him strategies for
composing in and conceiving of a medium like hypertext, a three-
dimensional writing "space" that has been described as a dungeon and a
castle. These strategies will be recounted in the final portions of this
dissertation. Ultimately, I intend to reconfigure Spenser and the memory
palace tradition in a heuretic equation with the present moment, to perceive
a new constellation that includes Spenser, the memory palace, literary theory
and the electronic storage and retrieval of information.37 The pattern that
emerges will take the form of a poetics of hypertext composition.

37"Historicism contents itself with establishing a causal connection between various moments in
history. But no fact that is a cause is for that very reason historical. It became historical post-
humously, as it were, through events that may be separated from it by thousands of years. A
historian who takes this as his point of departure stops telling the sequence of events like the
beads of a rosary. Instead, he grasps the constellation which his own era has formed with a
definite earlier one." Walter Benjamin, "Theses on the Philosophy of History," Illuminations,
trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1968) 263.

82

While there is no direct evidence that Spenser learned the art of
remembering by building memory palaces or theaters in his mind, as a
student of rhetoric, learning the fourth step of memoria, we can suppose he
would have read the recommendations that Roman rhetoricians made about
its efficacy. For a poet who wanted to be remembered, whose laureate
ambitions are all but a commonplace among contemporary criticism,38 these
strategies may have seemed appealing, even indispensable. And the
allegorical nature of the memory palace certainly would not have escaped
Spenser. For these reasons, The Faerie Queene, as the major work of allegory
in the English Renaissance, is a good place to look for evidence of Spenser's
mnemonic strategies.

The most striking moment of Spenser's use of the memory palace

comes in the proem to Book Two. Spenser begins by defending his choice of

the romance as a vehicle for his matter in the rhetorical ploy of

anthypophora, or response to anticipated objections.39

Right well I wote most mighty Soueraine,

That all this famous antique history,

Of some th'aboundance of an idle braine

Will iudged be, and painted forgery,

Rather then matter of just memory,

Sith none, that breatheth liuing aire, does know,

Where is that happy land of Faery,

Which I so much do vaunt, yet no where show,

But vouch antiquities, which no body can know. (Il.pr.l)

38While critics agree that he was ambitious and that his ambitions are seen in the poetry,
some recent discussion concerns the extent of his obsequiousness. Derek Alwes, for instance, takes
issue with Louis Montrose and tries to argue that "the poetic role Spenser defines for himself in
his works is that of accomplice, not adversary. He understands the ideology of the state as
espoused by Elizabeth and those who speak in her name; he knows he can make a valuable
contribution to it (hoping, of course, that the value of his contribution will be recognized and

rewarded, Who knowes not Colin Clout?' Spenser's Self-Advertisement in The Faerie

Queene, Book 6," Modern Philology 88 (August 1990), 29.

39I derive my definition from Richard Lanham's A Handlist of Rhetorical Terms: A Guide for
Students of English Literature (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968).

83

Here Spenser feels the need to justify the memory that he invokes by

"vouching" antiquities. The emphasis on memory is significant, for Spenser

must defend his use of legendary material as relevant subject matter in a

poem meant to praise the queen, since this "famous antique history" might

be judged, as he writes, as "th'aboundance of an idle braine" and "painted

forgery" rather than "matter of just memory." And this is the book in which

the Arthurian legends come to play their most significant role: later, in canto

nine, Arthur and Guyon enter the chamber of Eumnestes ("good memory")

in the House of Alma and find two important books stored there, one titled

Briton Moniments, and the other titled Antiquitie of Faerie. Arthur reads

the former, Guyon the latter, throughout canto ten. The writings in these

memorial texts nourish the two heroes ("alma" in Latin means

"nourishing") in that they are strengthened to go forth with their quest.

Alma, therefore, as the source of a book learning that provides national

identity, is the ultimate "alma mater."

Spenser answers this potential objection raised in the first stanza of the

proem by invoking the startling discoveries that voyagers to the New World

were making, finding places never thought to exist: "But let that man with

better sence aduize,/That of the world least part to vs is red: /And dayly how

through hardy enterprize,/Many great Regions are discouered,/Which to late

age were neuer mentioned" (II.pr.2.1-5). The poet "logically" concludes that

just because something has never been seen does not mean that it does not

exist: "Why then should witlesse man so much misweene/That nothing is,

but that which he hath seene?" (II.pr.3.4-5). The following stanza reveals

where the "land of Faery" is:

Of Faerie lond yet if he more inquire,

By certaine signes here set in sundry place

He may it find; ne let him then admire,

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But yield his sence to be too blunt and bace,

That no'te without an hound fine footing trace.

And thou, O fairest Princesse vnder sky,

In this faire mirrhour maist behold thy face,

And thine own realmes in lond of Faery,

And in this antique Image thy great auncestry. (II.pr.4)

The inquirer can find Faerie lond by certaine signes here set in sundry place.

These lines figure the entire poem, The Faerie Queene itself (the here ), as

the memory p(a)lace in which the poet, the architect of this palace, has placed

"signs" of Fairy Land. In the epic poem, metaphorically represented here as a

mirror, Elizabeth can see her face, and in the antique image she can find her

ancestry.

Here Spenser is using the language of the Art of Memory: images or

signs set in places in order to call forth the memory of what was stored by

means of the memory image. Yates recounts the instructions for using the

Art of Memory:

The first step was to imprint on the memory a series of loci or
places. . . . The images by which the speech is to be remem
bered ... are then placed in imagination on the places which
have been memorised in the building. This done, as soon as the
memory of the facts requires to be revived, all these places are
visited in turn and the various deposits demanded of their
custodians. (The Art of Memory 3)

Spenser, in other words, provides in The Faerie Queene a guided tour of
Fairy Land, of the Queen herself— the virtues to be upheld, the vices to be
avoided.

The final stanza of the proem specifically connects this language of the
art of memory to the act of allegorizing, demonstrating Spenser's conscious-
ness of the allegorical nature of the mnemotechnique. It continues directly
from the fourth, apologizing for the use of allegory:

The which O pardon me thus to enfold
In couert vele, and wrap in shadowes light,

85

That feeble eyes your glory may behold,

Which else could not endure those beames bright,

But would be dazled with exceeding light. (II.pr.5.1-5)

The "antique Image" in which Elizabeth will behold her ancestry must be

veiled in allegory, for she is so stunningly beautiful that persons beholding

her would go blind. This circuitous way of praising Elizabeth's glory is

framed in the language of allegorizing: the covert veil, the wrapping in

shadow's light, refers to the "speaking other" of alios agoreuei. 40 Spenser

admits to this strategy also in his Letter to Ralegh, again invoking the "places"

in which she appears in the poem:

In that Faery Queene I meane glory in my generall intention, but
in my particular I conceiue the most excellent and glorious
person of our soueraine the Queene, and her kingdome in Faery
land. And yet in some places els, I doe otherwise shadow her.
(Poetical Works 407).

The structure of allegory itself suggests the mnemonic procedure

inherent in placing images in places to trigger the memory. Craig Owens says

that, in allegory, "the image is a hieroglyph; an allegory is a rebus — writing

composed of concrete images" ("The Allegorical Impulse" 209), and one can

view this dynamic in the following description of a "memory for things"

image, in which a defense lawyer mnemonically inscribes the following in

his memory place:

We shall imagine the man in question as lying ill in bed, if we
know him personally. If we do not know him, we shall yet take
some one to be our invalid, but not a man of the lowest class, so
that he may come to mind at once. And we shall place the
defendant at the bedside, holding in his right hand a cup, in his
left, tablets, and on the fourth finger, a ram's testicles. In this
way we can have in memory the man who was poisoned, the
witnesses, and the inheritance. (Yates 11)

40Spenser uses the same "shady" language in the Letter to Ralegh, in which he again is in the
mode of apology: "To some I know this Methode will seeme displeasaunt, which had rather
haue good discipline deliuered plainly in way of precepts, or sermoned at large, as they use
then thus clowdily enwrapped in Allegorical deuise" (Poetical Works 407).

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The scene here visually represents all of the elements that the lawyer wishes
to recall; most notable is the grotesque depiction of the ram's testicles, which
is a visual pun on the Latin testes, meaning "witness." In her work on
allegory, Maureen Quilligan points to the relationship between the pun and
allegory as well when she calls attention to "the essential affinity of allegory
to the pivotal phenomenon of the pun, which provides a basis for the
narrative structure characteristic of the genre" (Quilligan 32).41

The vivid image of the ram's testicles also identifies the importance of
violence or grotesquery in the fabrication of these images. It was believed that
resorting to such methods facilitated image recall. Eugene Vance, following
consideration of Yates' work, writes, "Violence may be seen not only as the
'subject' of oral epic narrative, but also as an aide-memoire or as a generative
force in the production of such narrative. In a commemorative culture,
events of violence . . . are given great prominence so that the collective
memory will be duly impressed with the pathos of 'history' as it is deployed:
violence as semiosis."42 One can easily see this aspect of the Art of Memory
in Spenser's The Faerie Queene, as David L. Miller points out in The Poem's
Two Bodies: "The mnemonic value of such vividness is a standard topic of
Renaissance rhetoric and poetics, and forms a basic strategy of Spenser's

41This is, in part, the grammatologisf s interest in the memory palace tradition, as it calls for a
kind of writing that embodies the picto-ideo-grammatical Writing that Derrida tries to
encourage: "The images for a word or term were generated by techniques similar to those
Derrida uses for his rebus or cartouche writing— antonomasia, puns, paragrams" (Ulmer,
Applied Grammatology 73). The visual puns employed in the memory palace tradition
provide the kind of rebus-writing for which grammatology strives.

42Eugene Vance, Mervelous Signals: Poetics and Sign Theory in the Middle Ages (Lincoln:
University of Nebraska Press, 1986) 54. Vance's chapter on the Song of Roland is in itself a
grammatological study of the poem as a manifestation of the effects of a shift from orality to
literacy in relation to the purpose of memory: "Though it would be silly to insist that the Song
of Roland is first and foremost a Song of Writing, we have every right to examine its implicit
models of self-representation for indices of an epistemological crisis rooted in the competing
cultural functions of speech and writing" (81).

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gothic extravagance in The Faerie Queene. " (24). One need only think of the

more "memorable" moments of the poem, for instance when in Book One

the dragon Errour is described as an "vgly monster plaine,/Halfe like a

serpent horribly displaide,/But thother halfe did womans shape

retaine,/Most lothsom, filthie, foule, and full of vile disdaine" (I.i.14.6-9),

who daily feeds "A thousand yong ones . . . /Sucking vpon her poisonous

dugs, eachone/Of sundry shapes, yet all ill fauored" (Li. 15.5-7), or at the end of

Book One canto eight when Duessa is stripped naked, she is described in the

following vivid terms:

Her dried dugs, like bladders lacking wind,

Hong downe, and filthy matter from them weld;

her wrizled skin as rough, as maple rind,

So scabby was, that would haue loathd all womankind.

Her neather parts, the shame of all her kind,

My chaster Muse for shame doth blush to write;

But at her rompe she growing had behind

A foxes taile, with dong all fowly dight:

And eke her feete most monstrous were insight;

For one of them was like an Eagles claw,

With griping talaunts armd to greedy fight,

The other like a Beares vneuen paw:

More vgly shape yet neuer liuing creature saw. (1.8.47.6 - 1.8.48)

Despite the influence of his "chaster Muse," Spenser manages to follow

through with this detailed description of Duessa's "neather parts" with the

purpose, I am arguing, of providing a memorable image in the same way that

one was trained to do in learning the Art of Memory.

There is also evidence in the tradition of the Art of Memory indicating

that the personification that suffuses allegorical writing and representation

was employed as part of the process of memorization. Yates again is helpful:

here she tells of an illustrated memory-image of Lady Grammar found in

Johannes Romberch's book, published in 1520: "Though devoid of aesthetic

charm, Romberch's Grammar is of importance to the student of artificial
memory. She proves the point that personifications, such as the familiar
figures of the liberal arts, when reflected in memory, become memory
images" (120). The personifications in The Faerie Queene are so pervasive a
part of Spenser's allegory that it would be tedious to catalogue them all.
These personifications, combined with the number of memorable "places" in
which they occur (for example, Errour in her cave or Acrasia in the Bower of
Bliss), fall within the tradition of the memory palace. The poem thus has an
overall effect of being structured like a memory palace: each book has its hero
who wanders from memory place to memory place, encountering person-
ifications of vices and virtues that are meant to be easily remembered:
Errour's den, the House of Lucifera, Orgoglio's castle, the House of Holiness,
the Castle of Medina, the Cave of Mammon, the House of Alma, the Bower of
Bliss, etc.43

Probably the most obvious example of a memory palace occurs in the
latter part of Book Two, when Arthur and Guyon visit and defend the House
of Alma. The knights tour the allegorical body of the castle, entering through
the mouth and then traversing the digestive tract, the heart, and finally the
head. In the head (the tower), they visit three compartments presided over by
three guardians: Phantastes (representing foresight and fantasy), an unnamed
steward that some give the name Judgment, who manages the other two
faculties, and Eumnestes (representing memory). The description of these

43Nico van den Boogaard, in his treatment of the Roman de la Rose, finds evidence that
Guillaume de Lords employed the "habit of mind" one finds in artificial memory practices,
which involve locating striking images in particular loci. He finds in particular the passage
enumerating the various species of birds inside the garden as employing this technique: "Je ne
vois qu'un seule explication: l'auteur a donne cette description sous l'influence de certaines
habitudes de pensee. 11 imaginait des loci differents et il placait dans chaque lieu une espece
d'oiseau. Je ne crois pas qu'il ait trouve cette disposition dans la tradition du locus amamus "
(89).

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loci and the relationships of the custodians constitute an allegory of the

mnemonic process one finds in the memory palace tradition.

The structure of the turret itself can be seen as a mnemonic of the three

parts of the mind as conceived in medieval philosophy and personified by the

above figures44: they are described as rooms in which allegorical personages

reside.

Therein were diuerse roomes and diuerse stages

But three the chiefest, and of greatest powre,

In which there dwelt three honorable sages,

The wisest men, I weene, that liued in their ages. (II.9.47.6-9)

The room, or "cell," was a typical part of a memory palace, a room in which

some memorable image was stored. "Cella, the word used by Geoffrey of

Vinsauf for the memory, also means 'storeroom,' as indeed its derivative

form, cellarium, English 'cellar,' still indicates" (Carruthers 35). The

descriptions of each of the chambers, too, invoke the memory palace

tradition. Phantastes' chamber was "dispainted all within,/With sundry

colours, in the which were writ/Infinite shapes of things" (II.9.50.1-3). The

walls of the second room, too, "Were painted faire with memorable gestes,/Of

famous Wisards, and with picturals/Of Magistrates, of courts, of tribunals . . ."

(II.9.53.3-5). And though Eumnestes' chamber is not described in terms of

images,

His chamber all was hangd about with rolles,

And old records from auncient times deriu'd,

Some made in books, some in long parchment scrolles,

That were all worme-eaten, and full of canker holes. (II.9.57.6-9)

The books and scrolls, the "memorable gestes / Of famous Wizards," the

"Infinite shapes of things" written on the walls all suggest the characteristics

44See Mary Carruthers's The Book of Memory, chapter two on "Descriptions of the neuro-
psychology of memory" for an in-depth presentation of medieval conceptions of cognitive
processes.

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of mnemotechnics. These are memory places that store information in the

form of visual and written material.

Another clue pointing to this tradition resides in Phantastes' chamber,

which is filled with flies "Like many swarmes of Bees assembled round/After

their hiues with honny do abound" (II.9.51.3-4). Carruthers speaks of the

conflation of bees and memory:

The compartments made by bees for their honey are called
cellae (still called "cells" in English). . . . Bees and birds are also
linked by persistent associations with memory and ordered
recollection. Indeed there is a long-standing chain or, perhaps
the better word, a texture of metaphor that likens the placement
of memory-images in a trained memory to the keeping of birds
and to the honey-making of bees. Trained memory is also
linked metaphorically to a library. And the chain is completed
by a metaphoric connection of books in a library both to
memories placed in orderly cells and to birds and bees in their
coops and hives. (35-36)

The presence of bees in this passage, then, is consistent with traditional

representations of the arts of memory, as is Eumnestes' library, full of rolls,

scrolls, and books. But here in this library are two important books, books

that the heroes of Book Two will read throughout the next canto. These

books, one called Antiquitie of Faerie lond, the other Briton Moniments,

serve a mnemonic function for Spenser's (re)presentation of British history.

The contents of the books themselves, selected as they were by Spenser,

become evidence of their import in terms of the allegorical function of the

three guardians Phantastes, "Judgment," and Eumnestes.

According to David L. Miller, the most important of these figures is

Judgment, as he is the only one among them, in stanza 54, said to "meditate"

("There sate a man of ripe and perfect age, /Who did them meditate all his life

long"). Miller points out the parallel to Diet, who is similarly described in

stanza 27 as being "rype of age,/And in demeanure sober, and in counsell

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sage" (27.8-9), and he suggests that the numerological coincidence (27 doubled
is 54) is no accident, and as such constitutes an allusion to Spenser (as Diet is a
"dispenser"): "Certainly there is an analogy between the functions performed
by Diet and Judgment: each within his own sphere chooses and directs, and
so shadows the poet's responsibility for the allegorical dispensation of his
narrative" (185). Miller calls this relationship among the three guardians a
"radical allegory of Spenserian poesis " insofar as "the meditative function of
the sage who operates [in the middle chamber] implicitly gathers memory
[Eumnestes] and imagination [Phantastes] into itself" (188). Such is the stated
purpose of The Faerie Queene as Spenser states in his "Letter to Ralegh": "a
Poet thrusteth into the middest, euen where it most concerneth him, and
there recoursing to the thinges forepaste [the stated realm of Eumnestes], and
diuining of things to come [the stated role of Phantastes], maketh a pleasing
Analysis of all" (Poetical Works 408).

And this becomes the purpose of the apparently haphazard representa-
tion of the histories: "In his treatment of the history Spenser therefore
implants certain patterns that invite the reader to exercise the synthetic
faculty of the middle chamber . . ." (Miller 200). This reading of Spenser the
dispenser of his allegory, implanting patterns for readers to discover, though
invoking the intentional fallacy, serves my reading of Alma's castle as a
memory palace. Part of the memory palace tradition involves choosing what
to remember and storing it in a particular place in the palace with an image.
This is the role of Spenser and Judgment: the selection and arrangement of
imaginative elements allegorizing the memorial texts of British history, into
which Spenser writes Queen Elizabeth as rightful heir and successor.45

45The irony of this arrangement can be seen in Spenser's description of the flies/bees swarming
in Phantastes' chamber, a description which figures the anxiety Spenser feels about employing
allegory for his purposes: "All those were idle thoughts and fantasies, /Deuices, dreames,

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Spenser becomes the palace architect of the books (memory "palaces" in

themselves), of Alma's Castle, of The Faerie Queene itself. As such, Spenser

engages the tradition of the memory palace in his attempt to inscribe the

Queen, as well as himself, in (literary) history.

Ralegh recognizes this project of inscription in his Commendatory

Verse, posing a rhetorical question which serves as a warning to the poet:

If thou hast formed right true vertues face herein:

Vertue her selfe can best discerne, to whom they written bin.

If thou hast beautie praysd, let her sole lookes diuine

Iudge if ought therein be amis, and mend it by her eine.

If Chastitie want ought, or Temperance her dew,

Behold her Princely mind aright, and write the Queene anew.

(Poetical Works 409; emphasis added)

Ralegh warns Spenser to re-write his poem if it does not please the Queen, if

he has not, that is, formed her face properly. He recognizes here the nature

of Spenser's act as an act of prosopopoeia, of "face-making." Insofar as The

Faerie Queene is an act of memorializing, of remembering the Queen before

her death, this act of prosopopoeia takes on a mnemonic function. I will

explore in the next chapter the extent to which prosopopoeia is a mnemonic

device and the various ways that Spenser, as memorial poet, as architect of

memory palaces, employs this device and what this means in terms of

Spenser's position within the transitional period of the sixteenth century.

opinions vnsound,/Shewes, visions, sooth saves, and prophesies;/And all that fained is, as
leasings, tales, and lies" (II.9.51.6-9). The Faerie Queene is filled with "leasings, tales, and
lies." Much has been said about Spenser's anxiety concerning his allegorical project. See, for
instance, Kenneth Gross: "This double valence of the imaginative work, its mingling of tyranny

and freedom, is something that the poem confronts with a certain anxiety [T]he poet seems

to work through such conflicts by the nearly obsessive repetition of scenes in which icons,
statues, phantasms, illusions and so on are first elaborately described and then summarily
transgressed, broken, dissolved" (16). See also Jacqueline Miller in Poetic License, in which she
corrects the failure in other readers to locate the source of Spenser's anxiety within the
fundamental basis of allegory. See page 100-101.

CHAPTER 3
SPENSER'S MNEMONICS OF LITERACY: THE MONUMENTALITY OF

PROSOPOPOEIA

Spenser, with his use of the memory palace tradition in his writing,
comes at the end of a long tradition of rhetorical pedagogy. The memory
palace was effective for centuries as a method of organizing information that
one wished to access in one's mind. During the Middle Ages, however, this
process began to be externalized somewhat upon the page, so that the
grotesque images that one once generated as a means of recalling information
come to be placed in the margins of medieval manuscripts to facilitate
memorization of entire pages for the purpose of remembering entire books.
The book becomes a mnemonic prosthesis at this point, a "technology of the
word" as Ong might call it, a tool of information storage and retrieval. After
the advent of the new technology of the printing press, further development
of mnemotechniques occurred, when Ramus developed his mnemonic
system based on outlining dichotomies, spatially arranging words only on the
page. This resulted in a transformation of mnemonic practices which
dropped the pre-print strategies of the memory palace for the new Ramist
methods such that for centuries the memory palace tradition has been
ignored as a viable means of information storage and retrieval.

With the advent of electronic technologies at the end of the twentieth
century, however, a new technology of information storage and retrieval has
come upon the scene of rhetorical pedagogy, one demanding a reconsidera-
tion of information storage strategies as they have been practiced with past

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"technologies of the word" and how they might be practiced with new
technologies such as hypertext, video, and virtual reality. Acknowledging
this current state of transition, this dissertation addresses the problem of
storing and retrieving information in the electronic medium of hypertext.
Strategies for storing information within this medium will involve practices
that will differ somewhat from storing information in print form. For this
reason, alternative strategies must be sought to employ the maximum
potential of the medium. One realm for such researching, I am suggesting, is
the Early Modern period, a time similar to our own in that a new mnemonic
system was coming into being — the print-driven Ramist system of
outlining— which displaced the classical tradition of the memory palace. The
sixteenth century saw the culmination of mnemonic practices that began with
the Greeks and truly flourished in the centuries preceding it, during the
Middle Ages, when the emphasis on visual stimuli for mnemonic recall
found its expression in the monastic artistry of marginalia.1 While the
ancient mnemotechnique of establishing a fixed set of places in which one
stored esoteric, often grotesque images meant to trigger the memory took the
backseat to the Ramist method, the current technologies are such that these
practices, abandoned as they were by the educational institution during the
sixteenth century, may have something to offer in solving this current
problem.

!Mary Carruthers tells of a set of glossed books of Psalms made in the twelfth century that
manifests this property of mnemonic marginalia: "One of their more original features is the use
of painted figures to help fix the page as a mnemonically functional visual image. These

figures usually inhabit the outermost margins of the page In addition to these figures,

several of the psalms have emblematic pictures painted next to their opening words; unlike the
citational figures, these can occur in the inner margin where the gloss itself is written, as well
as in the outermost one, suggesting that they too were considered essential in the gloss, and
acted as markers for these particular psalms" (216).

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The difficulty of discussing these practices in terms of orality, literacy,
and computeracy, especially when focusing on transitional periods like the
sixteenth and twentieth centuries, is that the boundaries between these terms
blur, making the process of labeling the practices difficult. Ong identifies this
problem when discussing rhetoric in Orality and Literacy: "The 'art' of
rhetoric, though concerned with oral speech, was, like the other 'arts,' the
product of writing" (109). Such is the problem with the memory palace:
while primarily a storage strategy for those without the benefit of writing, it
employs the techniques of allegory (in its use of images to represent other
words or concepts), techniques that only become possible with the advent of
writing. One might identify this phenomenon as "residual orality" in reverse
in that, rather than orality encroaching on literate practices as a residue,
literacy falls back into oral practice. What one can be sure of is that the actual
practices that emerge are hybrids of the general categories "orality" and
"literacy."

A close study of Spenser's mnemonics will reveal the same hybrid
effect. While he engages the tradition of the memory palace in various ways,
as the previous chapter delineates, he also fully embraces the ultimate trope
of print literacy — prosopopoeia. A reading of Spenser's poetry will reveal the
ambivalent nature of his mnemonics, especially in his use of prosopopoeia.
Though committed to prosopopoeia as that trope which will give voice to the
dead in print, thereby winning the monumental status that both he and his
patrons desired, Spenser also recognizes in Prosopopoia, or Mother Hubberds
Tale the uncontrollable quality of words, offering a vision of the duplicity of
language in his personifications of prosopopoeia in the Fox and the Ape.
This ambivalence can also be seen in Spenser's figuration of depth as the
place of evil and mystery. As a writer in the midst of many volatile

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transitions — including, among the religious and political upheavals of the
time, the shift in mnemonics that I have worked to delineate — we can
recognize in Spenser an anxiety parallel to our own concerning the embrace
of new technologies of communication.

This chapter explores Spenser's relationship to print literacy as a new
information storage technology that fosters an ideology of depth. Such an
exploration will help us better understand our own relationship to print
literacy and our reluctant embrace of computeracy. The era of the printed
book, which begins in Spenser's century and ends in our own, is characterized
by the trope of prosopopoeia, which allows for a writer to achieve the illusion
of control over language in the drive both to deny the duplicitous quality of
language and to assert the "natural" unity of signifier and signified, symbol
and thing symbolized. Depth comes to be associated with the unifying drive
of the symbol, whereas allegory comes to be viewed as superficial, an artificial
form of symbolism that is too simplistic to communicate effectively. But
with the advent of poststructural philosophy, theorists recognize the will to
power over language as an effect of the ideology of depth, and the remainder
of the dissertation will in part identify computeracy as manifesting the post-
structural ideology of the surface, offering a theory of hypertext composition
based on the surface-oriented concept of the rhizome and the new organizing
trope of metalepsis.

Prosopopoeia and the Mnemonics of Literacy

We must return to the proem of Book Two to find the ultimate
moment of prosopopoeia in the poem. Recall that in stanza four we
encountered the presence of the memory palace in talk of "signes" set in

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"sundry places." The narrator faces Elizabeth in order to face her, to make
her face: "And thou, O fairest Princesse vnder sky,/In this faire mirrhour
maist behold thy face" (11. 6-7). "This mirrhour" is the poem, The Faerie
Queene, in which Elizabeth will be able to see her self, her "face," "true
vertues face," according to Ralegh. The entire poem, then, becomes Spenser's
creative act of prosopopoeia, of making the face of the Queen so that she can
see herself within the poem figured as a mirror. The implications of this
become quite interesting when we consider what is involved in the trope of
prosopopoeia.

One sees what is at stake in the act of prosopopoeia in the various ploys
for patronage made in many of Spenser's minor poems. In these instances,
Spenser uses the fear of being forgotten as a way of pressuring the aristocracy,
including the Queen herself, to patronize his work. He positions himself as a
maker of (literary) monuments which will commemorate them as well as
him. In so doing, he presents himself as indispensable to their posterity. The
nature of prosopopoeia as a figure of speech, recent literary theory tells us,
bears this commemorative function, a function that can be effectively
fulfilled only in printed texts.

One might expect a plea for patronage in dedicatory sonnets, but the
intimidating tone of Spenser's Dedicatory Sonnets to The Faerie Queene
threatens oblivion if the patrons do not comply. In the one written for the
Earle of Oxenford, Spenser reminds the Earl that, because his ancestry is
allegorized within the poem, he needs to defend the poem for the sake of his
own memory: the "vnripe fruit" of the poem "by thy countenaunce doth
craue to bee /Defended from foule Enuies poisnous bit . . . Sith th'antique
glory of thine auncestry /Vnder a shady vele is therein writ,/And eke thine

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owne long liuing memory" (Poetical Works 410). The sonnet to the Earle of
Essex employs the same language:

But when my Muse, whose fethers nothing flitt

Doe yet but flagg, and lowly lerne to fly

With bolder wing shall dare alofte to sty

To the last praises of this Faery Queene,

Then shall it make more famous memory

Of thine Heroicke parts, such as they beene:

Till then vouchsafe thy noble countenaunce

To these first labours needed furtheraunce. (Poetical Works 411)

While "countenance" in these two instances suggests earlier senses of the

word to mean "position" or "standing," the pun on countenance as "face" is

unmistakable when prosopopoeia is understood as a mnemonic act.

The extent to which "facing" is viewed as a kind of remembering

becomes apparent when Spenser equates "defacing" with forgetting. In the

sonnet to the Lord of Hunsdon, whom Spenser praises for his deeds in battle,

Lord Hunsden is said to pacify the Northern rebels "And their disloiall powre

defaced clene,/The record of enduring memory" (Poetical Works 412). He is

praised for defacing from the record of enduring memory the memory of the

Northern rebels, and for this act Spenser assures him, "Liue Lord for euer in

this lasting verse,/That all posteritie thy honour may reherse." A similar

moment occurs in The Faerie Queene, Book Three, in which Britomart,

while receiving Merlin's prophecies concerning the future of her race, asks

Merlin, "Will not long misery late mercy make, /But shall their name for

euer be defast,/And quite from the earth their memory be rast?" (III.3.43.7-9).

This equation between defacing and forgetting is not difficult to imagine

when one recalls the purpose of Protestant iconoclasm, or defacing, of

Catholic icons: the Protestant goal was to erase from the earth the memory of

Catholicism's existence.

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Spenser argues the importance of patronage to the memory of both the

poet and the patron in The leaves of the Muses, in which the Muses are

given voices to give voice to their despair over the state of poetry. The

dedication to Lady Strange supplies an apt epithet to Spenser's message in the

poem itself: "I devised this last slender meanes . . . that by honouring you

they might know me, and by knowing me they might honour you.

Vouchsafe noble Lady to accept this simple remembrance. . . ."2 Throughout

this poem the Muses bewail the current state of poetry by using the metaphor

of defacing, which suggests that not just poetry but good poetry must be

supported for the proper "facing" to occur.3 Polyhymnia, Muse of Rhetoric,

speaks most specifically of this in the last speech of the poem, explaining how

bad writing defaces the personification of Poetry: "Heapes of huge words

uphoorded hideously . . ./Have mard the face of goodly Poesie,/And made a

monster of their fantasie" (553, 557-58). This act of defacing is compared soon

after to an act of iconoclasm:

But now nor Prince nor Priest doth her [Poetry] maintaine,

But suffer her prophaned for to be

Of the base vulgar, that with hands unclene

Dares to pollute her hidden mysterie.

2Edmund Spenser, The Yale Edition of the Shorter Poems of Edmund Spenser. Eds. William A.
Oram, Einar Bjorvand, Ronald Bond, Thomas H. Cain, Alexander Dunlop, and Richard Schell
(New Haven & London: Yale UP, 1989) 268. Hereafter cited as Shorter Poems.

3Defacing pervades the poem. All of nature, in fact, according to the narrator, feels the effects
of the muses' tears in a pathetic fallacy of defacing: "all that els seemd faire and fresh in
sight . . .Was turned now to dismall heavinesse,/Was turned now to dreadfull uglinesse" (11.39,
41-42). Thalia, the Muse of Comedy, cries of how "Fine Counterfesaunce and unhurtfull
Sport,/Delight and Laughter deckt in seemly sort" are "wholly now defaced" (197-98, 202);
Euterpe, Muse of Pastoral, speaks of how "monstrous error . . ./Hath mard the face of all that
semed fayre," and Ignorance, "armd with blindnesse and with boldnes stout, /(For blind is bold)
hath our fayre light defaced" (257-58, 265-66); Erato, Muse of Love poetry, apostrophizes to
Venus: "For lo thy Kingdome is defaced quight,/Thy scepter rent, and power put to wrack"
(399-400); Calliope, Muse of Epic poetry, speaks like Clio of the decline in heroes: "They all
corrupted through the rust of time,/That doth all fairest things on earth deface . . . Ne do they
care to have the auncestrie/Of th'old Heroes memorizde anew" (433-34, 439-40).

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And treadeth under foote hir holie things,

Which was the care of Kesars and of Kings. (565-570)

But "One onelie lives . . . /That with rich bountie and deare cherishment,/
Supports the praise of noble Poesie" (571, 573-74). That one is Elizabeth, who
is said here to support poetry, but as William Oram writes in the introduc-
tion, "This is of course a picture of Elizabeth as her poets and learned men
would have liked her to be, not as she was, and it attempts by mirroring her
ideal self to persuade her to live up to it" (Shorter Poems 266). Without
poetry, without Spenser's poetry, the poem asserts, the proper kind of
prosopopoeia cannot occur, only acts of defacing.

The mock-epic Virgils Gnat works in the same way. The poem tells of
a gnat who, upon trying to save a sleeping shepherd from an approaching
snake, gets swatted, goes to Hades, and returns as a ghost to complain to the
shepherd. The poem becomes a catalogue (one might say memory palace) of
epic heroes and mythology as the Gnat recounts all that he sees in Hades.
After the complaint, the shepherd, feeling sufficiently guilty, decides to erect a
monument in memory of the Gnat.4 Speaking of the similarity between this
poem and Teares of the Muses, Ronald Bond comments, "Since, like The
Teares of the Muses, Virgils Gnat deals with the interdependence between
the lowly poet and the sponsors who authorize his writing, the erection of
that monument suggests that the patron is capable of conferring fame on the
author just as much as the author is capable of 'eternizing' the patron"
[Shorter Poems 296). The symbiotic relationship between poet and patron

4The language of this moment again invokes the memory palace tradition: "By that same
Riuer lurking vnder greene,/Eftsoones he gins to fashion forth a place, /And squaring it in
compasse well beseene,/There plotteth out a tombe by measured space" (649-52, emphasis
added). The tomb is an especially significant content for a memory place, as subsequent
discussion will bear out.

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creates a memorable monument for the patron and secures fame and fortune

(i.e. patronage) for the poet.

The erected monument, the tomb, has special significance in terms of

the dynamic of mourning central to prosopopoeia. There is consensus

among twentieth-century theorists of prosopopoeia that mourning motivates

the desire to "face" the dead so that the dead can speak. J. Hillis Miller, for

example, in considering the tropology of Ovid's Metamorphoses, and in

particular the story of Pygmalion, finds in the Pygmalion myth a prototype of

prosopopoeia:

If most of the metamorphoses in the Metamorphoses go from
human to inhuman, life to death, animate to inanimate, the
coming alive of Galatea goes the other way. The name for the
figure of speech of which this metamorphosis is the literalizing
allegory is prosopopoeia. This trope ascribes a face, a name, or a
voice to the absent, the inanimate, or the dead. (3-4)

In this giving voice to the dead, the dead are memorialized in a kind of

resurrection that makes them undead but yet not alive. Ned Lukacher

recognizes this dynamic in his treatment of prosopopoeia in Primal Scenes.

He locates an origin for prosopopoeia in the masks of Greek tragedy and the

intended effect these were meant to have as a form of "half-mourning":

The Greek prosopon and the Latin persona signify an
inseparable connection between the theatrical and the
chthonian. They signify the inseparable connection between
taking on the voice of the other and mourning. In assuming
the voice of the dead, the masked actor performs an act of half-
mourning, reminding the audience not only that the voice that
speaks is already dead but also that it lives on behind the mask.
With each utterance the voice announces that it is neither
properly dead nor alive but somewhere between the two. (90)

The places of the stage and the crypt, the living and the dead, collapse in the

mask of prosopopoeia so that the dead cannot yet be finally dead.

102

This is precisely what we see in the figure of the dead gnat, albeit a
humorous treatment of this feature of prosopopoeia. The gnat is given a
voice to recount its experience to the unknowing shepherd so that the
shepherd can properly mourn its passing. Its past heroism and present
suffering require recognition. In response, the shepherd erects a monument
in memory of the gnat, a memorial tomb so that it will not be forgotten.5
This moment is consistent with Paul de Man's formulation of prosopopoeia
as "the fiction of the voice-from-beyond-the-grave" ("Autobiography as De-
facement" 927).6

We see the same dynamic involved in Spenser's complaint entitled
The Ruines of Time. The narrator of the poem chances upon the site of a
former Roman city named Verulamium (called "Verlame" in the poem),
which once stood on the shore of the Thames River, and discovers a

5This attitude of desiring commemoration did not always exist, as Philippe Aries recounts in
Western Attitudes Toward Death: From the Middle Ages to the Present. At one point after the
emergence of Christianity, bodies were buried in collective graves with no attempt to identify
any of the individuals. Starting in the middle ages, though, a return to inscribing monuments
and including an effigy of the individual, at first for the illustrious, along with the increase in
plaques affixed to church walls or pillars, point to the increased desire to remember the burial
place of individuals and to perpetuate their memories. Aries also suggest a connection between
this phenomenon and the awareness of individuality. See pp. 46-52.

6This comes in an essay that treats Wordworth's use of prosopopoeia in his Essays upon
Epitaphs, one text of which, as de Man shows, "counsels against the use of its own main figure"
i.e. prosopopoeia (928). De Man's deconstruction of Wordsworth's text points to the anxiety
that the poet felt, the threat of using this trope: "'Doth make us marble,' in the Essays upon
Epitaphs, cannot fail to evoke the latent threat that inhabits prosopopoeia, namely that by
making the dead speak, the symmetrical structure of the trope implies, by the same token, that
the living are struck dumb, frozen in their own death. The surmise of the "Pause, Traveller!"
thus acquires a sinister connotation that is not only the prefiguration of one's own mortality but
our actual entry into the frozen world of the dead" (928). This anxiety leads Wordsworth
violently to denounce the use of figurative language, for figurative language "is not the thing
itself but the representation, the picture of the thing and, as such, it is silent, mute as pictures
are mute." Because we are bound to using language, our dependency upon writing renders us
"silent as a picture, that is to say eternally deprived of voice and condemned to muteness."
Prosopopoeia therefore both restores the voice to the dead but deprives the living of authentic
experience: "Death is a displaced name for a linguistic predicament, and the restoration of
mortality by autobiography (the prosopopoeia of the voice and the name) deprives and
disfigures to the precise extent that it restores" (930).

103

personification or "Genius" of the city, weeping on that very spot. Much of

what follows in the poem is the voice of Verlame lamenting the fall of Rome,

the passing of power, the mutability of earthly existence. The role of this act

of prosopopoeia in this complaint is highlighted in the opening lines, in the

narrator's description of an absence:

It chaunced me on day beside the shore

Of silver streaming Thamesis to bee,

Nigh where the goodly Verlame stood of yore,

Of which there now remaines no memorie,

Nor anie little moniment to see,

By which the travailer, that fares that way,

This once was she, may be warned to say. (Shorter Poems 232)

No monument exists, and therefore, in the language of these opening lines,

no memory of the ruined city. Immediately after these lines appears the spirit

of the city, its prosopopoeia, in the form of a female "Genius" who then

provides with the "fiction of her voice-from-beyond-the-grave" a memorable

monument to the city that once stood there.

It is within Spenser's poem, however, that this mnemonic monument

is built so as to remember the city. It is also within this poem that Spenser

remembers many dead members of Elizabeth's court, including the Earl of

Leicester and Sir Philip Sidney, providing for them a literary monument of

the kind for which Spenser wanted his patrons to patronize him. In this

sense the poem serves as a reminder similar to those in the dedicatory

sonnets examined above insofar as it reminds its readers of the anonymity of

death, an anonymity that is inevitable outside of the commemorative

parameters of the poem. Such reminding is the impetus behind the lines

preceding these laments for Leicester and Sidney, lines which again point to

the equation of defacement and forgetting:

But whie (unhappie wight) doo I thus crie,
And grieve that my remembrance quite is raced

104

Out of the knowledge of posteritie,

And all my antique moniments defaced?

Sith I doo dailie see things highest placed,

So soone as fates their vitall thred have shorne,

Forgotten quite as they were never borne. (11. 176-182)

Immediately after these lines, the lament for Leicester begins, making him

and the other subjects of the lament those "daily things highest placed" who

are forgotten soon after they have died, the fates cutting their vital thread.

These lines reflect Verlame's acceptance of the permanence of forgetting: like

the famous place for which she is the Genius, those placed high in Elizabeth's

court too will become "antique moniments defaced." Again, Spenser

ironically remembers them in a poem about their being forgotten.

While it certainly is an exaggeration to say that these prominent figures

would be immediately forgotten, Spenser would have liked them to think

otherwise: hence the eulogy on the "'eternizing' powers of poetry" in lines

344-4907 Here again one finds a straightforward pitch to those who desire

immortal fame, a pitch for financial support:

How manie great ones may remembred be,

Which in their daies most famouslie did florish?

Of whome no word we heare, nor signe now see,

But as things wipt out with a sponge to perishe,

Because they living, cared not to cherishe

No gentle wits, through pride or covetize,

Which might their names for ever memorize. (11. 358-364)

The "gentle wits" are poets like Spenser who need to be "cherished" (i.e.

taken care of within the patronage system) so that they can forever

memor(ial)ize those who flourished famously. The word and the sign

become timeless monuments in this equation, "For [the Muses] be daughters

of Dame memorie" who can break the gates of hell and carry out their souls

into immortality:

7See Richard Schell's introduction in Shorter Poems 225.

105

The seven fold yron gates of grislie Hell,

And horrid house of sad Proserpina,

They able are with power of mightie spell

To breake, and thence the soules to bring awaie

Out of dread darkenesse, to eternall day,

And them immortall make, which else would die

In foule forgetfulnesse, and nameles lie. (11. 372-379)

Here, forgetfulness and namelessness are equated with death, but nameless-

ness can be avoided if the person desiring remembrance enters into Spenser's

linguistic economy. Without the aid of the "daughters of Dame memorie,"

one is doomed to "foule forgetfulnesse."

Spenser emphasizes that it is not just any monument that will do to

commemorate a famous person; only literary monuments will do, for the

monuments of gravestones and mausoleums are subject to time's ravaging

hand. The following stanza indicates this in a catalogue of monumental

structures destroyed in time:

Such one Mausolus made, the worlds great wonder,

But now no remnant doth thereof remaine:

Such one Marcellus, but was torne with thunder:

Such one Lisippus, but is worne with raine:

Such one King Edmond, but was rent for gaine.

All such vaine moniments of earthlie masse,

Devour'd of Time, in time to nought doo passe. (11. 414-420)8

Only poetry can truly guarantee one's remembrance, as the stanza

immediately following this one indicates:

But fame with golden wings aloft doth flie,
Above the reach of ruinous decay,
And with brave plumes doth beate the azure skie,
Admir'd of base-borne men from farre away:

8These lines are similar to Spenser's sonnet translations in Theatre for Worldings, a few of
which recount the process of large monumental structures, products of humankind's vanity,
crumbling to the earth. Most significantly for my discussion, see, for instance, number three,
which describes a tomb, a "sharped spire / Of diamant" upon which sat a golden pot," And in
this golden vessel couched were / The ashes of a mightie Emperour ... A worthie tombe for such
a worthie corps." At the end, though, "A sodaine tempest from the heaven, I saw, / With
flushe stroke downe this noble monument" (Shorter Poems 472).

106

Then who so will with vertuous deeds assay
To mount to heaven, on Pegasus must ride,
And with sweete Poets verse be glorifide. (11. 421-427)

As long as one is remembered in verse, one will never die, for Spenser's

verse will live forever, and it is in the verse that the commemorated live on:

"Thy Lord shall never die, the whiles this verse / Shall live, and surely it

shall live for ever: / For ever it shall live, and shall rehearse / His worthie

praise. . . . Such grace the heavens doo to my verses give" (11. 253-256, 259).9

Despite this distinction between the durability of stone monuments

and that of printed texts, the permanence of print could make the act of

prosopopoeia like that of erecting an engraved monument, insofar as the

disembodied voice of the dead, the act of mourning that prosopopoeia

9Compare the following stanzas from The Faerie Queene Book 4, canto 2, in which Spenser
offers his excuse for stealing Chaucer's unfinished "Squire's Tale":

But wicked Time that all good thoughts doth waste,
And workes of noblest wits to nought out weare,
That famous moniment hath quite defaste,
And robd the world of threasure endlesse deare,
The which mote haue enriched all vs heare.

0 cursed Eld the cankerworme of writs,

How may these rimes, so rude as doth appeare,

Hope to endure, sith workes of heauenly wits

Are quite deuourd, and brought to nought by little bits?

Then pardon, O most sacred happie spirit,

That I thy labours lost may thus reuiue,

And steale from thee the meede of thy due merit,

That none durst euer whilest thou wast aliue,

And being dead in vaine yet may striue:

Ne dare I like, but through infusion sweete

Of thine owne spirit, which doth in me surviue,

1 follow here the footing of thy feete,

That with thy meaning so I may the rather meete. (st. 33-34)

Here, Spenser fears his work falling victim to the same "cankerworm of writs," Time, which
defaced the "monument" of Chaucer's tale. The topos of inadequacy is the vehicle: if this
happens to such a heavenly work as Chaucer's, then it will certainly happen to these "rude
rhymes." The contrast here suggests that Spenser realizes the fallibility of the statements he
makes concerning poetry's immortalizing powers; as such, his eulogies to this power of poetry
can be understood as a ploy for patronage.

107

represents, or the person being "faced" (like Queen Elizabeth, for instance)
become fixed in print. While Spenser expressed his fear of his texts
succumbing to the "cankerworms of writ," his age of print saw a new
protection against the natural decay of books: "After the advent of print,
however, the durability of writing material became less significant; preserva-
tion could be achieved by using abundant supplies of paper rather than scarce
and costly skin. Quantity counted for more than quality" (Eisenstein 79).
Vast numbers of relatively uniform texts become the equivalent of carving
letters in stone: print in the sixteenth century begins to take on the status of
the monumental.10

In fact, it is this monumental status of print which makes the sixteenth
century differ from the medieval manuscript culture that preceded it. The
manuscript was subject to any number of changes in its textual life, for
various reasons, often because it was reproduced one copy at a time by scribal
monks who sometimes incorporated errors. Chaucer bemoans this problem
in a poem entitled "Chaucers wordes unto Adam, His Owne Scriveyn," in
which the poet asks his scrivener to "wryte more trewe," warning him
against "negligence and rape."

Chaucer's poem was necessary because scribes like Adam were
forced by their jobs, wittingly or unwittingly, to become collabor-
ators; their mistakes, as well as their intentional revisions, were
immediately incorporated into the work and copied faithfully,
or unfaithfully, by subsequent scribes. The invasion of a work

10Jay David Bolter draws attention to this phenomenon in his treatment of the history of
writing in Writing Space. He writes of how "the conceptual space of a printed book is one in
which writing is stable, monumental, and controlled exclusively by an author" (11); elsewhere
he characterizes the page as "the monumental writing space of ink on paper" (68). In suggesting
the potential effects that computer writing like hypertext will have upon our writing
practices, Bolter notes that marginal technologies of writing will become central, whereas the
familiar practices of print will become pushed to the margins: "What in turn becomes marginal
is precisely that quality that has been central for the last 500 years: the fixed and monumental
page of print, the book that exists in thousands of identical copies and heroically resists
change" (60).

108

by censorship, commentary, additions, sequels, or simply by
scribal inefficiency, was the rule rather than the exception.
(Sturges 115-16)

Scholars sometimes forget this feature of medieval textuality, but the fact of
its frequency allows the contrasting permanence of print to become clear.11
This was a novelty in the fifteenth and sixteenth century, one that Spenser
took advantage of by continuously pointing out the monumental status of
printed verse in poems that frequently invoke the funereal emotion of
mourning as somebody or another is commemorated.12 In a real sense,
Spenser continuously conceives of books over and over again as the "tombs
of those who cannot die."13

Such a formulation would suggest that prosopopoeia, in its status as an
act of mourning as well as its desire for monumentality, is a trope peculiarly
suited to writing, and particularly to print. De Man says as much in his essay
"Hypogram and Inscription" when he writes that "prosopopeia ... is the very
figure of the reader and of reading" (de Man 45). Elsewhere, he writes that "to
read is to understand, to question, to know, to forget, to erase, to deface, to
repeat — that is to say, the endless prosopopoeia by which the dead are made to
have a face and a voice which tells the allegory of their demise and allows us

nEisenstein, too, makes a similar point: "Of all the new features introduced by the
duplicative powers of print, preservation is probably the most important. To appreciate its
importance, we need to recall the conditions that prevailed before texts could be set in type. No
manuscript, however useful as a reference guide, could be preserved for long without undergoing
corruption by copyists, and even this sort of 'preservation' rested precariously on the shifting
demands of local elites and a fluctuating incidence of trained scribal labor" (78-79). Of course,
since the degree of permanence that we attribute to printed texts today was only beginning to
evolve back then, the sixteenth century becomes the transitional moment when this charac-
teristic of print first became a possibility.

12Many of the minor poems, as previous discussion demonstrates, concern the mourning of
various significant personages. Some of those not mentioned are Daphnaida, written for the
death of Arthur Ganges' wife, and Astrophel and The Doleful Lay of Clorinda (whose
attribution to Spenser is a point of contention), which were both written for Sidney.

13 A quotation of the poet George Crabbe cited in Bolter 100.

109

to apostrophize them in our turn" (de Man, "Shelley Disfigured" 68). The
only way the dead can be given a voice, a life, that is lasting and permanent is
in letters. The difference between prosopopoeia in oral narrative and
prosopopoeia in printed writing is the difference between "writing on the
wind" and writing in stone: one can be lost whereas the other can be
preserved.14

Each act of writing, which allows for acts of reading, then, is an act of
prosopopoeia, a giving voice to a voiceless character, a bringing to life of
something dead, inanimate, alive only in language. Hillis Miller recognizes
this feature of prosopopoeia as well, calling it "the fundamental generative
linguistic act making a given story possible" (Hillis Miller, Versions of
Pygmalion 13). Narrative becomes, in this formulation, the extension of
prosopopoeia, the putting into play of the resurrected voices. De Man makes
similarly sweeping statements about the significance of prosopopoeia, calling
it "the master trope of poetic discourse" ("Hypogram" 48). But the power of
prosopopoeia, according to de Man, resides in its ability to call into question
figuration itself. In its status as a form of catachresis,15 the arbitrariness of
signification becomes apparent: "Prosopopeia undoes the distinction between
reference and signification on which all semiotic systems, including
Riffaterre's, depend" ("Hypogram" 50).

14I use here the title of a subchapter in Bolter's Writing Space entitled "Writing on the
Wind," in which he discusses the history of oral poetry and compares this to electronic writing.
See chapter four.

15"That a catachresis can be a prosopopoeia, in the etymological sense of 'giving face,' is clear
from such ordinary instances as the face of a mountain or the eye of a hurricane. But is it
possible that, instead of prosopopoeia being a subspecies of the generic type catachresis (or the
reverse), the relationship between them is more disruptive than that between genus and
species" (de Man, "Hypogram" 44).

110

Defining all semiotic systems as unstable, as deconstructionists like
de Man are wont to do, reminds one that the tropes that allow us to commu-
nicate themselves hinder communication. So it is with prosopopoeia as the
trope of reading. At the end of "Shelley Disfigured," de Man equates reading
with monumentalization, the fixing of a meaning in stone, one might say,
the denial of language's inherent fluidity or its freezing. Reading becomes,
in this case, an act of disfiguration, of de-facement, something to avoid but
something that is unavoidable.16 This is unavoidable because it is part of the
tropic nature of language. Hillis Miller finds in Pygmalion the perfect
personification or prosopopoeia of this process:

A prosopopoeia is a human creation, a product of the capacity
within language for tropological substitution. We can, for
example, shift the name of a part of the human body to a feature
of the landscape and speak of the face of a mountain. This
operation is concealed when the anthropomorphism then
becomes part of ordinary language. We forget that we ourselves
have artfully personified the mountain and are fooled into
taking our own creation literally. . . . Pygmalion is so skillful an
artist, skilled even in concealing his art from himself, that he
is taken in by his own fabrication: it seems to him that Galatea
must be a real girl. (8-9)

Figuring literalism as a statue and an act of literalistic reading as a turning to

stone has been found in Dante and Chaucer as well as Ovid: "But in what

sense exactly is Dorigen turned to stone? In Dante, Medusa is a figure of

literalism, of the letter that kills, and correspondingly, of that kind of reading

which insists on the letter and resists figuration . . ." (Shoaf, Dante 16). These

16"If it is true and unavoidable that any reading is a monumentalization of sorts, the way in
which Rousseau is read and disfigured in The Triumph of Life puts Shelley among the few
readers who 'guessed whose statue those fragments had composed.' Reading as disfiguration, to
the very extent that it resists historicism, turns out to be historically more reliable than the
products of historical archaeology. To monumentalize this observation into a method of
reading would be to regress from the rigor exhibited by Shelley which is exemplary precisely
because it refuses to be generalized into a system'" (69).

Ill

same concerns appear in de Man and Hillis Miller, who locate prosopopoeia
as incorporating fundamental aspects of language.

Spenser appears to exhibit such an awareness in his poem Prosopopoia,
or Mother Hubberds Tale, which typically goes by its subtitle but which I will
refer to as Prosopopoia to remind us, as I think Spenser wanted us to be
reminded, that this is a poem about the powers of language, of figuration, of
prosopopoeia itself.17 The poem recounts the narrator's recollection of a story
told by Mother Hubberd, one of his visiting friends who is there to help him
"deceave" his senses with stories as he lies bedridden. The story tells of the
deceitful behavior of a Fox and an Ape as they swindle all whom they
encounter for a profit. In the process, they assume different identities as they
"fashion" themselves to the opportunities that become available in their
travels: first they disguise themselves as a Soldier and his retainer, tricking a
shepherd to allow them to watch his flock, which they subsequently devour;
next, at the advice of a priest, they become a parish priest and his clerk and
abuse their office by taking advantage of the parishioners; then they become
courtiers, fitting right in to the hypocrisis of court life; finally they adopt the

17Most discussion of this poem reads it as an allegory of Spenser's disagreement concerning the
Queen's proposed marriage to the French duke D'Alencon and as a critique of Lord Burghley
allegorized as the Fox. See, for instance, S.K. Heninger's account in Sidney and Spenser: The
Poet as Maker as well as William Nelson's The Poetry of Edmund Spenser. In his introduction,
William Oram says that "The disagreement about the political allegory of the poem has
distracted critical attention from the work itself" (Shorter Poems 329). The only critic in recent
years to treat the issue of Spenser's use of prosopopoeia as a trope is Kent T. Van den Berg, who
wants to argue that Spenser presents the Fox and the Ape as exemplars of deceit whose
behavior is to be avoided: "As a comprehensive persona making, Mother Hubberds Tale sets
the poet's power to personify against his disdain for the counterfeit self, and thereby
exemplifies his struggle to maintain moral and aesthetic integrity in the face of a fragmented
and deceptive world" (86). While I agree with Van den Berg that the poem explores "without
evasion the affinity of the poet's highest aspirations to creative power with the lowest forms
of greed and guile" (99), I do not agree that Spenser ultimately locates himself as separate from
the world corrupted by the Fox and the Ape, as Van den Berg would like to conclude. The poem
reads more, I would argue, as an acknowledgement of the inherently duplicitous quality of
language itself, its inability to be controlled, its tendency, like the Fox and the Ape, to
suddenly change identity and become something other than what it was.

112

identity of a king and his advisor, stealing a crown, mitre and skin from a
sleeping lion and enjoying his wealth. In every case they don their "masks"
in order to steal from those they fool.

It is precisely in their capacity as thieves that they come to represent the
duplicitous nature of language. The Fox and the Ape, in their shape-shifting
capacity, signify signification itself in their ability to attach to, detach from and
re-attach to different referents at will. Their actions in the poem come to
reflect the action of language and specifically of the trope prosopopoeia; as
such, they personify prosopopoeia itself. If prosopopoeia means "face-
making," then these two embody this principle in their continuously shifting
identity, and as such become a prosopopoeia of prosopopoeia.18 And if the
Fox and Ape are meant to be metaphors for prosopopoeia, and prosopopoeia
is, as de Man writes, the "trope of tropes," then their representation as thieves
translates to the thieving quality of tropes, the way that tropes allow for the
theft of one word's meaning or sense for the benefit of another word's
enhanced meaning.19

18The language of facing pervades the poem. The Mule, advising them before their advent at
Court, says in answer to the question of how they could win favor there, "How els (said he) but
with a good bold face, / And with big words . . ." (11. 645-46). While there, Reynold the Fox
"Supports his credite and his countenaunce" (1. 668) as the Ape "with sharp quips joy'd others
to deface" (1.707). While there, the Ape fits in, and is able to entertain them "With mumming
and with masking all around" (802), but ultimately he cannot "upholde / His countenaunce in
those his garments olde" (927-28). At the end of the poem, in the notorious dens ex machina
which defaces the genre of the poem itself (Thomas Greene remarks that Mercury's appearance
in the poem is "an extraordinary breach of decorum" [quoted in Van den Berg, note 11]; Oram
writes of "the extraordinary stylistic indecorum of the episode: Spenser inserts a topos from
classical epic into a medieval beast-fable, punctuating the 'base' colloquial style of the
surrounding poem with the more elaborate and complex syntax of the lines in which Jove looks
down to earth" [Shorter Poems 332]), Mercury defaces himself, doffing "that faire face and
that Ambrosiall hew, / Which wonts to decke the Gods immortall crew" (1267-68) in order to
disguise himself.

19De Man writes in "The Epistemology of Metaphor," "We have no way of defining, of
policing, the boundaries that separate the name of one entity from the name of another; tropes
are not just travellers, they tend to be smugglers and probably smugglers of stolen goods at that.
What makes matters even worse is that there is no way of finding out whether they do so with
criminal intent or not" (17).

113

Van den Berg believes that Spenser writes about this quality of
language in order to overcome it, almost as though representing the evil will
bring about a kind of cure:

The poem's value inheres less in the satiric warning Spenser
may have wished to convey to his sovereign about abuses in
her kingdom than in the exercise of imaginative power that
recreates those abuses in the fictive form of Fox and Ape; as
Yeats would say, "Only when we are gay over a thing, and can
play with it, do we show ourselves its master, and have minds
clear enough for strength." (97)

Van den Berg assumes that Spenser desires to master the kinds of abuses that

the Fox and Ape represent, but I would argue that Spenser desires no such

mastery, that if he can be said to have any purpose that purpose would be to

demonstrate the duplicity of language. What better way to illustrate this than

by ending the story with Mercury, messenger god of language, patron of

thieves and literacy, arriving to bring the Fox and Ape to justice by doing just

what they do:

Through power of that, his cunning theeveries
He wonts to work, that none the same espies;
And through power of that, he putteth on,
What shape he list in apparition. (11. 1287-1290)

Van den Berg rightly observes that "Spenser symbolizes in Mercury an

ambivalent attitude toward the nature of the poet's power" (98), but he

concludes that "The poet [like Mercury] has assumed the guise of Mother

Hubberd, adopting her base style as a way of entering the world corrupted by

Fox and Ape" (99). This latter statement implies that the poet does not

participate in the corrupt world he is trying to correct, that his adoption of

Mother Hubberd's base style is an innocent maneuver meant to correct the

"amorality" of human art.

I would argue, however, that the poem shows us that no such mastery

is possible, no moralistic transcendence occurs. The very tropes of language

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themselves, which are figured as thieves smuggling meaning, as plunderers
of the denotative meanings of words, make it impossible to escape partici-
pating in these "crimes of language." If the poet is like Mercury, as Van den
Berg asserts, then he is like the ultimate defacer, one who works "cunning
theeveries" in order to steal whatever identity he requires to get his message
across. This, in fact, seems to be what the narrator has done in adopting
Mother Hubberd's "bad tongue." He admits to defacing her tale at the end:

So Mother Hubberd her discourse did end:

Which pardon me, if I amisse have pend,

For weake was my remembrance it to hold,

And bad her tongue that it so bluntly tolde. (11. 1385-1388)

The problem with Van den Berg's conclusion is the problem with the

narrator, a problem which comes clear in the opening lines. The "righteous

Maide" Virgo (or Astraea) has fled the corrupt world because she disdains the

"sinfull worlds upbraide" (11. 1-2), leaving behind "the hot Syrian dog" to

corrupt "th'ayre with his noysome breath, / And powr'd on th'earth plague,

pestilence, and death" (11. 5, 7-8). Tradition has it that during the dog days of

summer madness reigned over the earth, that the dog-star made people go

mad. It is this madness that plagues the narrator and therefore makes him

unreliable:

Emongst the rest a wicked maladie
Raign'd emongst men, that manie did to die,
Depriv'd of sense and ordinarie reason;
That it to Leaches seemed strange and geason.
My fortune was mongst manie others moe,
To be partaker of their common woe (11. 9-14)

Both Van den Berg and Oram argue that the narrator is not a con-man: "Of

crucial importance in understanding the work is the narrator — a figure who,

like Mercury, is an artist but who, unlike the Fox and the Ape, is not a

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con-man" (Shorter Poems 333). I am suggesting that, because the narrator is

an artist like Mercury, a poet, he cannot help but be a con-man.

The importance of Prosopopoia lies in the perspective it provides on

Spenser's ambivalence to the trope that is so central to his later work, that is

an emblem of the new, monumental mnemonic system of print literacy that

he was embracing. Though he "faces" Elizabeth in The Faerie Queene, he is

very much aware that it is an act of forgery akin to the gimmicks of

Archimago. The verbs "to face" and "to forge" occur side by side in two

instances, as though synonyms, implicating prosopopoeia as a devious

procedure. The first instance comes in the Priest's talk to the Fox and Ape,

when his advice turns from the subject of how to obtain a benefice to how to

succeed at Court:

But if these list unto the Court to throng,

And there to hunt after the hoped pray,

Then must thou thee dispose another way:

For there thou needs must learne, to laughe, to lie,

To face, to forge, to scoffe, to companie,

To crouche, to please, to be a beetle stock

Of thy great Masters will, to scorne or mock (11. 502-508)

"To lie,/ To face, to forge": this does not paint a flattering portrait of what a

courtier has to do in order to succeed, and it could be read as a bitter picture of

Spenser's own experience. The other moment comes in Book Five of The

Faerie Queene, in the description of the villain Malengin in canto nine:

Thereto both his owne wylie wit, (she sayd)

And eke the fastnesse of his dwelling place,

Both vnassaylable, gaue him great ayde:

For he so crafty was to forge and face,

So light of hand, and nymble of his pace,

So smooth of tongue, and subtile in his tale,

That could deceive one looking in his face;

Therefore by name Malengin they him call,

Well knowen by his feates, and famous ouer all. (st. 5)

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Malengin is smooth of tongue because he is a rhetorician, as we see in stanza
12, when he tries to soothe the damsell Samient: "But when the villaine saw
her so affrayd, / He gan with guilefull words her to perswade, / To banish
feare" (11. 4-6). As a rhetorician, he uses language like a net to capture the
damsell: "To which whilest she lent her intentiue mind, / He suddenly his
net vpon her threw, / That ouersprad her like a puffe of wind" (9.14.1-3).
This description echoes other passages in Spenser's poems that figure
questionable rhetoricians and/or poets as spiders who weave nets (or "texts")
of language.20

So, despite Spenser's investment in prosopopoeia as the monumental
trope of print, as that which will secure him and his wealthy and generous
patrons' fame, he understands the deceitful quality of the language in which
he writes and figures his anxiety concerning this in dangerous and disruptive
characters like Archimago and Malengin. The ambivalence that Van den

20One instance of this occurs in II. 1.8, in the description of Archimago:

Such whenas Archimago them did view,

He weened well to worke some vncouth wile,

Eftsoones vntwisting his deceiptfull clew,

He gan to weaue a web of wicked guile,

And with faire countenance and flattring stile (11. 1-5)

"Clew" literally means "ball of thread" and is said in Smith and de Selincourt's glossary to
mean "plot," thereby connecting this allusion to the poet's task of creating a plot as being
"deceitfull" to the act of weaving webs and stylistics. Weaving and spiderwebs were connected
in the sixteenth century to the rhetoric of sophistry, and the language describing Archimago,
Mammon, and Malengin embodies these Early Modern equations of spiderwebs or nets and
rhetoric, spiders and rhetoricians. The etymology of text— from "texo" meaning "to weave" —
certainly fostered this analogy, but the prevalence in encyclopedic texts as well as throughout
Spenser's poetry indicates its status as a sixteenth-century commonplace. In the folio on insects
of Aldrovandus's encyclopedia, for instance, he mentions the proverb that makes a connection
("collatio") between the woven webs of spiders (the "texentis telas") and the feigning lies of
men ("comminiscentis mendacia"): "Proverbialis videlus, ilia collatio, Aranei ex sese texentis
telas, et hominis ex seipso comminiscentis mendacia" (629). Alexander Ross, too, in his
sixteenth-century text entitled Mijstagogus Poeticus, also speaks of spiders as sophists: "Subtil
and trifling Sophisters, who with intricacies and querks entangle men, are no better than
Spiders, whose captious fallacies are no less hateful to the Wise, than Arachnes web was to
Minerva " (30).

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Berg notes in Spenser's presentation of Mercury actually pervades his corpus,
and can be attributed, as I have tried to suggest, to his involvement in a
transitional period of shifting mnemonics. This grammatological sensitivity
to Spenser's historical moment and the apparatus within which he worked
has yielded a portrait of an inventor who has invented a hybrid mnemonic
that includes both the ancient and marginalized tradition of the memory
palace and the emergent monumentality of print. Further consideration of
the poetry will demonstrate Spenser's ambivalence concerning the advan-
tages of writing, which are only enhanced by print, as opposed to its apparent
dangers. Ultimately, we see a poet who is aware, only unconsciously perhaps,
that the new mnemonic of print is threatening an entire tradition but who is
not quite committed to preventing its advent.

The Ideology of Depth and the Prosopopoeia of the Book

For earlier twentieth century thinkers, the ideology of alphabetic
literacy — which engenders attendant notions of authority, individuality, and
autonomy — had become habitual. The invention of new media such as
radio, television, and computer technologies, especially the most recent
breakthroughs in information sciences, however, has challenged the
comfortable assumptions of the literate apparatus, such that the historical and
linguistic origins of such assumptions are coming more and more to be
exposed. Coincident to the emergence of the new media, too, is the advent of
poststructural forms of analysis, which compel the philosopher to discover
the metaphors underlying an ideological supposition in order to reveal their
motivating force. This force is the force of the dead metaphor, which

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constitutes the force of ideology as it is forged in habits of language use. So
what are the dead metaphors governing language use in the print apparatus?

Lakoff and Johnson are quite good at reminding us of the dead
metaphors that we rely upon, that we have forgotten with decades and even
centuries of usage. In their book Metaphors We Live By, for instance, they
expose the prevalence of depth at the heart of fundamental concepts of
communication. As an example, they recognize depth as a common
denominator underlying the three metaphorical concepts "argument is a
container," "argument is a building," and "argument is a journey." Depth
does not work the same way for each: "In the BUILDING and CONTAINER
metaphors, what is deeper is more basic. The most basic parts of the
argument are the deepest: the foundation and the core. However, in the
JOURNEY metaphor, deep facts are those that are not obvious" (100-101). The
journey metaphor suggests that an argument "covers ground," but it also
requires that difficult points be covered to a certain degree of depth, as seen in
the following example: "We have come to a point where we must explore
the issues at a deeper level " (101).

The point I wish to make is that, in each of these metaphorical
concepts, depth is a privileged metaphor. One is required to have a "founda-
tion" and a "core" in an argument to be successful according to an ideology of
depth, because depth represents the basic parts of an argument. In the
journey metaphor, too, depth is privileged, as it represents difficulty, not
insurmountable difficulty but difficulty that one overcomes by "going
deeper." The privileged status of this metaphor becomes clear when one
encounters its counterpart, the surface, as can be seen in the following
example that Lakoff and Johnson employ to demonstrate another complex
overlapping of the journey metaphor with the UNDERSTANDING IS

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SEEING metaphor: "In an argument the superficial points (those on the

surface) are obvious; they are easy to see, easy to understand. But the deeper

points are not obvious. It requires effort — digging — to reveal them so that we

can see them" (103). The surface is equated with superficiality, a trait which

male chauvinists attribute to blond-haired women: they are shallow because

they cannot think deep thoughts.

Depth did not always bear this exalted status. As previously

mentioned, Michael Near's grammatological study of Beowulf claims that

the poem manifests an anxiety toward writing that is caused by the poet's

investment in the values of orality. This anxiety over literacy is figured in a

sword hanging in the cave within Grendel's mere, which constitutes the only

instance of writing in the entire poem. Because it is both submerged in the

mere and tells a story of submergence, the status of writing is suspect:

This unambiguous association of writing with submersion and
alienation — the suggestion that the technology of writing is part
of a supernatural art practiced by those isolated from human
company, by creatures such as Grendel — acknowledges the
existence of literacy but simultaneously suggests that its practice
is deeply suspect and that its practitioners are psychologically
distant from the known community of voices into which
writing has been brought as a remnant of a hidden and alien
world. (324)

The monsters, as Near states, come from a deep place, and this deep place is

associated with writing by means of the sword's presence — the writing on

which tells of another instance of submersion and drowning in a deep place.

Near recognizes in this reading of Beowulf that the poem was a product of a

transitional period, a period when writing was first becoming available to the

early Anglo-Saxons but when it had not yet been fully embraced. As a

participant in an oral culture, the Beowulf poet recognized the threat

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inherent within the emerging literate apparatus and subsequently embodied
this threat within the two monsters of the mere.

Spenser's moment is likewise transitional, but this transition differs in
the sense that it is more an extension of values already inherent in
chirography than the emergence of a radically alternative epistemology, as in
the example of the Beowulf poet above. Ong has noted the "residual orality"
that still existed for the British in the sixteenth century and that would last
until the Romantic period.21 Something of this residual orality can be
viewed in Spenser's treatment of depth, which is frequently similar to the
Beowulf poet's as Near represents it. But Spenser also presents some of the
privileging of depth that is more familiar to our contemporary standards. In
this way, then, the poet reveals an ambivalence toward depth, an ambiva-
lence which further demonstrates its historical origin as well as its ideological
effects.

Several occasions in the poetry present depth as acceptable, even

desirable, connecting it to reading, writing, and learning. In Prosopopoia, for

instance, the narrator describes an illiterate priest whom the Fox and Ape

encounter on the road:

For read he could not evidence, nor will,

Ne tell a written word, ne write a letter,

Ne make one title worse, ne make one better:

Of such deep learning little had he neede,

Ne yet of Latine, ne of Greeke, that breede

Doubts mongst Divines, and difference of texts,

From whence arise diversitie of sects,

And hatefull heresies, of God abhor'd:

But this good Sir did follow the plaine word,

Ne medled with their controversies vaine. . . . (382-391)

21 See Ong, Rhetoric, Romance, and Technology chapter two: "This chapter is concerned with
oral phenomena in Tudor literature, but its main interest is in oral residue rather than in
consciously cultivated oral effects" (25). Later he writes, "The romantic quest for originality,

the novel, the new, reveals romanticism as a typographic phenomenon Insofar as

romanticism persists today, as it does, we are still in a typographic world" (294-295).

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If we accept the supposed naivete of Mother Hubberd as a narrator, this

passage becomes an ironic comment on the medieval nature of this priest's

theology. Mother Hubberd says that this "deep learning," which entails

knowledge of Latin and Greek, causes the "hatefull heresies" that were a

product of the Protestant Reformation. The priest, a suspect character to begin

with, embraces a medieval Catholicism to which Spenser is of course

opposed. "Deep learning" is thus valued in this instance, as it is that which

enabled the Reformation to occur. More significantly, reading and writing are

valued in terms of the access they provide to a depth.

Another instance of valorization occurs at the end of The Teares of the

Muses, during Polyhymnia's final complaint about the state of poetry. After

she says that bad poets deface Poesy, she recalls "ages past," when poetry was

the province of the powerful:

Whilom in ages past none might professe
But Princes and high Priests that secret skill,
The sacred lawes therein they wont expresse,
And with deepe Oracles their verses fill:
Then was shee held in soveraigne dignitie,
And made the noursling of Nobilitie. (559-64)

This was a time when Poetry was the "nursling of Nobility" and "held in

sovereign dignity." The fact that their verses are filled with "deepe Oracles"

demonstrates the positive connotation of depth, as it is depth that grants such

dignified qualities to their verses.

Here Spenser names himself High-Priest of Elizabethan poetry, since it

is his verse that will cleanse the current pollutions, if only the Queen and

other wealthy patrons adequately finance his endeavors. There is, after all,

something holy to the act of writing: God carves the ten commandments into

stone in the same way that he writes his epistle in the hearts of Christians.

With Christians, though, he writes "not on tablets of stone but on tablets of

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human hearts" (2 Corinthians 3: 3). This is certainly the allusion within the

passage in which Red Cross Knight speaks of the lesson learned after being

freed from Orgoglio's dungeon:

This dayes ensample hath this lesson deare

Deepe written in my heart with yron pen,

That blisse may not abide in state of mortall men. (1.8.44.7-9)

The deep writing that occurs here literally incorporates the word of God; the
level of depth achieved is a result of the impression made upon the
penitent's heart.

The scene of writing, however, becomes the primary site of ambiva-
lence for Spenser in his rendition of the problematic of depth, for the writers
in The Faerie Queene are the ones who figure depth and the dangers
inherent in depth.22 The first and most obvious occurrence of this tendency
arises early in Book One, in the description of Archimago. After inviting the
unsuspecting hero and his damsel to spend the night at his hermitage, he
goes to his study and "seekes out mighty charmes":

22 Spenserian criticism has made discussion of Spenser and the question of writing a
commonplace. The tenor of these arguments presents Spenser as a kind of reading teacher, a
poet anxious about the meanings of his poem being misconstrued. DeNeef elevates this topic to
the subject of an entire book, each brief chapter pointing out how Spenser "bodies forth" his
concern for readers reading literally by incorporating within his texts examples of "wrong
readers" and corrupt authors: "To understand the ways in which writing and reading become
problematic for the Renaissance poet, we must be alert to the metaphors which define or
articulate not the success but the abuse of the Word: the parodic false maker, like Satan or
Archimago or Despair; the fault-finding misreader, like Redcross, like Adam . . ." (12).
Quilligan reaches the same conclusion about Red Cross Knight in her distinguishing of allegory
from allegoresis, claiming that the subject matter of the former must concern the problem of
reading, as in FQ I, when we see Spenser teaching us how to read by showing how poor a reader
the Red Cross Knight is: "With this first episode, Spenser teaches the reader how to read The
Faerie Queene " (36). David Miller also sees Red Cross Knight as being in need of reading
lessons: "At the House of Holiness Spenser represents the dynamics of this conversion as a set of
reading skills opposed to the literalizing hermeneutics of despair" (88). Patricia Parker, too,
in Inescapable Romance, believes that the main problem for Red Cross Knight is learning how
to read as he travels in "a landscape of only potential significances and disjunctive signs" (65).
And Jacqueline Miller identifies this concern in the latter half of The Faerie Queene :
"Commentators have noted that in the last three books of The Faerie Queene there is a growing
self-consciousness and disillusionment as the poet despairs about the efficacy of his poetry; the
narrative begins to attend explicitly to its own composition and to the issue of writing itself"
(99).

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Then choosing out few wordes most horrible,

(Let none them read) thereof did verses frame,

With which and other spelles like terrible,

He bad awake blacke Plutoes griesly Dame. (1.1.37.1-4)

Archimago is here one who "frames verses," similar to the poet himself, and

his magic is associated with depth, as he calls forth "out of deepe darknesse

dred / Legions of Sprights" (1.1.38.1-2), one of which he sends "through the

world of waters wide and deepe / To Morpheus house" (1.1.39.2-3).

Archimago as writer is intimate with depth — with deep darkness, with the

deep residence of Morpheus.

Merlin, too, is also figured as a writer whose practice of magic groups
him with Archimago as a writer intimate with depth. It is his "deepe science,
and hell-dreaded might" (ffl.2.18.7), associating the depth that the sciences he
practices allows him to achieve with hell, that creates the mirror in which
Britomart views Artegall. And when Britomart goes to visit him, she has to
go "low vnderneath the ground, / In a deepe delue, farre from the vew of
day" (III.3.7.6-7). Upon entering, Britomart finds Merlin "Deepe busied bout
worke of wondrous end, / And writing strange characters in the ground, /
With which the stubborn feends he to his seruice bound" (III.3. 14.67-9). The
concentration necessary to carry out the activity of writing here makes it a
"deep business."

Another infamous Spenserian antagonist, not normally associated

with writing, is also figured in this manner. Mammon, typically conceived as

an emblem of Avarice, is obliquely described in terms of textuality:

His yron coate all ouergrowne with rust,

Was vnderneath enueloped with gold,

Whose glistring glosse darkned with filthy dust,

Well yet appeared, to haue beene of old

A worke of rich entayle, and curious mould,

Wouen with antickes and wild Imagery. (II.7.4.1-6)

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This coat is something "woven," something that has a "gloss," terms which

can also be attributed to textuality. Its textual nature is verified a few stanzas

later, when Guyon says to him, "I read thee rash" (II.7.7.8, emphasis added).

Mammon is a rhetorician, one who weaves tenuous texts of sophistic

persuasion as he tries to woo Guyon into sin. And like Archimago, he is

familiar with deep dark places: to get to his place, Mammon leads Guyon

down "A darkesome way, which no man could descry, / That deepe

descended through the hollow ground, / And was with dread and horrour

compassed around" (20.7-8). Furthermore, while Guyon tours the Cave of

Mammon, he sees the Garden of Proserpina, through which "the riuer of

Cocytus deepe" (56.8) flows, and he sees Tantalus, who "drenched lay full

deepe" (57.9). "Deepe was he drenched to the vpmost chin" (58.1), the poet

repeats, after which he recounts that Guyon "espyde / Another wretch, whose

carkasse deepe was drent / Within the riuer" (61.1-3), who soon reveals

himself to be Pilate. Here, depth represents not only the place of

punishment— Hell— but also the extent of the punishments, thereby

doubling the jeopardy that depth represents.

For a final rhetorical antagonist associated with depth we must return

to a passage late in Book Five, which features Malengin. Malengin is a

rhetorician par excellence who is also said to inhabit deep places:

And eke the rocke, in which he wonts to dwell,
Is wondrous strong, and hewen farre vnder ground
A dreadfull depth, how deepe no man can tell;
But some doe say, it goeth downe to hell. (V.9. 6.2-5)

Like Malengin's cave, other places of depth are associated with Hell. For

instance, when Duessa seeks the aid of the Goddess Night to save the

wounded Sansjoy, she is said to carry the "heauie corse with easie pace / To

yawning gulfe of deepe Auernus hole" (1.5.31.2-3). And in Arthur's

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apostrophe to Night, spoken in frustration due to his failed search for
Florimell early in Book Three, he wonders why God would call her "oft from
Stygian deepe" (III.4.56.7).

The dungeons of evil characters are also always associated with depth.
The House of Pride, presided over by Lucifera, has a dungeon where those
enthralled to this sin have been cast. Red Cross Knight manages to escape
this trap, for "his wary Dwarfe had spide, / Where in a dongeon deepe huge
numbers lay / Of caytiue wretched thrals" (1.5.45.7-8). In the Orgoglio episode,
however, after drinking from an enchanted well, the Knight is unable to fight
Orgoglio, who "in a Dongeon deepe him threw without remorse" (1.7.15.9).
The dungeon that Proteus puts Florimell in also is repeatedly said to be a deep
dungeon: in Book Three, for instance, when he first captures her, "Downe in
a Dongeon deepe he let her fall" (III.8.41.8), and when the narrative thread
picks up again late in Book Four, the narrator reminds the reader that
"Vnlouely Proteus . . . Her threw into a dongeon deepe and blind" (IV. 11.2.2-
4) and repeats, "Deepe in the bottome of an huge great rocke / The dongeon
was, in which her bound he left" (IV.11.3.1-2).

So, though writing allows for a certain depth of understanding to be

achieved, though it is the instrument of God in literally embodying his word

in the flesh, the depth that it brings about is highly suspect in The Faerie

Queene, as the above catalogue of references ought to establish. This makes

sense, given Spenser's documented suspicion of allegorical writing, his fear of

not being in control of the language. This at least is the pose that he takes in,

for instance, the letter to Ralegh, which opens with the rationale for his

writing such a letter:

Sir knowing how doubtfully all Allegories may be construed,
and this booke of mine, which I haue entituled the Faery
Queene, being a continued Allegory, or darke conceit, I have

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thought good aswell for auoyding of gealous opinions and mis-
constructions, as also for your better light in reading thereof,
(being so by you commanded,) to discouer unto you the general
intention and meaning, which in the whole course thereof I
haue fashioned, without expressing any particular purposes or
by-accidents therein occasioned. (Poetical Works 407)

The assumption here is that allegory, a "dark conceit," requires "discovery" in
order to avoid misconstructions of meaning, and if recent critics are right in
claiming that Spenser's allegory self-reflexively inscribes the scene of writing
and all its attendant darkness— a darkness reminiscent of that encountered in
deep dungeons — then we see here an awareness of the slippery quality of
(allegorical) language itself. Such awareness comes to be more and more
prevalent as the writing and study of literature develops as an institution,
eventually resulting in the hegemony of the symbol and the disparagement
of allegory.

This desire to control language can be viewed in the subsequent
development of literature and in the emergence of literary criticism as an
institution. Each of these derives its fundamental assumptions from the
apparatus of print literacy, which comes into its own for English writers
during the Romantic period. As Ong has observed, "After the development
of print in the mid-1400's, it took several hundred years for the invention to
have its full effect in deadening the original sound world where the word has
its natural habitat. By the mid-1800's, the effect of typography was at its
maximum" ("Comment: Voice, Print, and Culture" 80-81). Current critiques
of traditional literary criticism as developed and practiced prior to twentieth-
century theoretical developments offer evidence of such unconscious
assumptions. The notion of the autonomous author, an author intending a
particular meaning and incorporating it in the body of his or her text, derives

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from the monumental status of the printed book.23 Jerome McGann, like

Ong, locates the origin of these concerns in the 1800's:

These ideas are grounded in a Romantic conception of literary
production, and they have a number of practical consequences
for the way scholars are urged to edit texts and critics are urged
to interpret them. The ideas are also widespread in our literary
culture, and since they continue to go largely unexamined in the
fundamental ways that seem to me necessary, they continue to
operate on the level of ideology. {A Critique of Modern Textual
Criticism 8).

This "ideology of final intentions," as McGann calls it, has implicated editors
of pre-Romantic texts who have generalized an historically-specific mode of
textuality that emerged in the 1800's to cover texts of the Medieval and
Renaissance periods, whose writers had a different ethic of textual produc-
tion.24 These impositions are ideologically sanctioned and institutionally
perpetuated, as de Man recognizes: "But from where then does the contextual
unity, which the study of texts reconfirms over and over again and to which
American criticism owes its effectiveness, stem? Is it not rather that this
unity . . . resides not in the poetic text as such, but in the act of interpreting
this text?" (Blindness and Insight 28-29). De Man here points out that the
unity taken to reside within the poetic text actually resides in a community of
readers who exist within the educational institution and who are ideolog-
ically motivated in perpetuating notions of final intentions and unified
poetic texts.

23I recognize that this very chapter indulges the notion of the autonomous author whose
intended meanings concerning his uses of prosopopoeia are transparent. Part of this is due to
participation in a kind of critical routine procedure, but part is also due to a desire to look
beyond the hermeneutic problems inherent within critical readings in order to approach an
author, text or period heuretically, as a grammatologist.

24 For this phenomenon as it occurs in Medieval textual scholarship, see Sturges, "Textual
Scholarship: Ideologies of Literary Production." For an instance of how critics have imposed
this contemporary view of textual production upon a historical consideration of the publication
history of Spenser's Complaints, see Brink, "Who Fashioned Edmund Spenser?: The Textual
History of Complaints ."

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This seeking after unity, this desire to find the core meaning of a text, I
am suggesting, results from a desire to control literary language, to grasp it, to
apprehend it, by imposing a unity upon it.25 As a consequence of this desire
for a controlled unity, allegory was subordinated to the symbol as the primary
aesthetic figure with the emergence of Romanticism26 in that allegory, which
came to be known by some as an artificial form of figuration that imposes a
connection between an abstraction and its allegorization, was opposed to the
symbol, which was organically conceived as a natural part of the whole which
it signifies, in the spirit of synecdoche. Gadamer is clearest in articulating this
phenomenon: "[A]llegory does not assume an original metaphysical relation-
ship, such as a symbol claims but, rather, a connection created by convention
and dogmatic agreement, which enables one to use a presentation in images
for something that is imageless" (67). This metaphysical relationship is
grounded in the assumption of a unity between symbol and thing symbol-
ized: "According to Solger the symbolic refers to an 'existence in which the
idea is recognised in some way or another', ie [sic] the inward unity of ideal
and appearance that is typical of the work of art. Whereas allegory creates this

25 It is to this tendency to close off the polysemy of texts that deconstruction, in part, responds.
As Geoffrey Hartman writes, in his articulate and effective apology for deconstruction in
Reading de Man Reading, "Having found that words were not rendered less ambiguous by being
organized in a literary way— that the ambiguity, or beyond it, the ambivalence, became more
complex and discomfiting— a tendency arose [among New Critics] to distinguish the literary
from the linguistic in terms that relapsed into humanistic cant. De Man . . . remains authori-
tative on this turn toward what he calls incarnational or salvational criticism. . . . The spirit of
criticism embodied by de Man seems to threaten the institutionalization of criticism itself" (5,
11).

26 De Man argues, in "The Rhetoric of Temporality," that, in actuality, allegory never was
completely abandoned and only comes to be subordinated by the subsequent act of critics
invested in the Romantic ideologies of textuality and authority that were in part a result of
their own creations: "For the lucidity of the pre-romantic writers does not persist. It does not
take long for a symbolic conception of metaphorical language to establish itself everywhere,
despite the ambiguities that persist in aesthetic theory and poetic practice" (208).

129

meaningful unity only by pointing to something else" (Gadamer 66).27 The
denial of the arbitrary allows a writer to achieve a sense of control, in that the
relationship between symbol and symbolized is said to exist in the symbol and
not outside of the symbol, in some arbitrary act of poetic creativity. The poet,
then, would have no need to fear if one were to misread the symbol, for then
the responsibility would be in the hands of the reader, whereas an allegorist
like Spenser, whose allegorizations are in his control ("a pure decision of the
mind," as de Man formulates allegory), fears that they will be misread and
therefore feels responsible for the reception of his allegory. Arbitrariness,
therefore, implies powerlessness, the kind of powerlessness that Spenser felt
in producing his allegories. This is the paradox of allegory: the more in
control one is, the less control one has over its reception; on the other hand,
removing the control over the symbol and its organic referent from the realm
of the poet conversely represents an act of taking control over language, a
form of control that poststructuralism tries to undermine.

The will to power over language is achieved in one way by resorting to
prosopopoeia. Though the dead are figuratively risen in a written text and
monumentalized in a printed text and, what is more important, given the
power to speak, this voicing is very much in control of the writer: what the
dead say and how they say it are choices that the author makes. In the same
way, the writer can control the kind of dialogue s/he has with the personified
being or resurrected entity. An early example of this phenomenon can be
seen in Theodore Beza's kones, which creates a memory palace of dead
martyrs which he offers to the reader as a place in which to dialogue with
them: "Beza purports to desire that his reader actually hear the resuscitated

27 De Man amplifies Gadamer's observations in "The Rhetoric of Temporality, pp. 187-208, in
which he writes that the relationship of the symbol is based "on the organic coherence of the
synecdoche" whereas the relationship of allegory "is a pure decision of the mind" (192).

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word of the confessors and be able to engage the textual figures in conversa-
tion . . ." (Coats 23). But "the dialogue into which the reader is called is in fact
one with Beza. Beza's ability to dialogue directly with the dead ... is in
dramatic counter-distinction to the martyr's inaccessibility to the readers;
through the verbal encounter he becomes one with the martyrs" (24). Coats'
analysis of kones suggests that it exemplifies a conscious "authorial asser-
tion" that actively interprets the text he composes: "The effacement of the
martyrs' bodies is necessary in order for Beza to write. It is the absence
produced by their death that generates the text. . . . Their bodies can only be
recuperated in the form of speech, through the textual medium" (26). In the
space of their death, Beza replaces an act of prosopopoeia which literally
embodies the voices of the dead, allowing him to write a dialogue that
ultimately writes his self.28

The will to power is also achieved by engaging in dialogue with a text.
The practice of engaging in dialogue with a text was theorized in the Middle
Ages, as Carruthers points out: "Medieval reading was highly active, what I
have called a 'hermeneutical dialogue' between the mind of the reader and
the absent voices which the written letters call forth, at times literally in the
murmur of ruminative mediation" (186). The medieval phrase "voces
paginarum," "the voices of the pages," evokes this notion of the
prosopopoeia of the page (Carruthers 170). Instructors of the late Middle Ages
in fact resorted to this form of dialogue as opposed to true dialogue with the
class in order to save time so that the entire curriculum could be covered in
the short time available to them. Ong writes of this occurrence:

Even where the abuse of dictation was avoided, a teacher who
might want to maintain some show of dialogue in the process
of relaying his subject matter, but who had to face a class in an

28 The book itself, whenever possible, provides a woodcut of the martyr's face.

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assigned subject at routine hours, would find it much more
feasible to have a written text than a living person as inter-
locutor. As we know from class notes and from annotated text-
books, as well as from commonplace present-day experience,
control was not easy despite the presence of a written text, and
coverage of the whole matter called for was often not completed.
Even partial dialogue with the class, in which the pupils
volunteered questions or objections, was necessarily severely
restricted, or one would never get through the material at all.
Hence from the earliest times the commentary on a written text,
an attenuated form of dialogue in which one interlocutor (the
writer of the text) need not even be alive, competed vigorously
with the more completely oral, more strictly dialectical
disputation. (Ong, Ramus 155).

This description of late Medieval pedagogical practice as it adapted to the new
curricular demands serves as another example of how the act of engaging in
dialogue with a text — that is, the art of constructing a prosopopoeia of the
book — generates a degree of control otherwise unattainable. The dialogue
with a book maintains a level of control that is unattainable in a dialogue
with a person, for one cannot predict the kinds of tangents a true conversa-
tion will take.

Such is the kind of dialogue that Gadamer promotes in his work,
according to Steven Crowell, who tells of two primary metaphors that occur
when one attempts in general to understand the meaning of language: the
metaphor of the text and the metaphor of the dialogue. These allow for three
variations of the interpretive moment as it is encountered in textual and
dialogical encounters: the first views textual interpretation in terms of
dialogue, the second views dialogue in terms of textuality, and the third
suggests that "the two may be held apart according to their essential
difference, reflecting what I will call the twofold 'ground' of intelligibility, the
ethical and the ontological" (339). His ultimate purpose is to recuperate
Gadamer's hermeneutics in terms of Levinas's ethical imperative, but it is his

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initial critique of Gadamer that I am interested in here. Gadamer employs the
metaphor of dialogue, viewing as he does the text as a voice. This maneuver
is in the realm of prosopopoeia and is similar to the Medieval conception
highlighted above in that it enables one "to construe the text as a 'partner' in
that dialogue constituted on the other side by the interpreter's (reader's)
interrogative activity. The text is not primarily an object for reconstruction;
its individuality is to be preserved by hearing it as a 'voice' in the conversa-
tion of tradition" (343).

This conception of the hermeneutic moment allows Gadamer to
participate in the same kind of control remarked above, for it emerges,
"ultimately, from a concern with the interpretation of texts" (342), interpreta-
tion being one way of controlling a text's meaning. Gadamer can conceive of
dialogue with texts because he is fully invested in the logocentric privileging
of voice and the pursuit of a metaphysical truth, and because he engages in
dialogue with a text conceived as a person and not a person itself, he is able to
pursue a "unity of meaning":

[T]he very idea of the 'unity' and 'identity' of a discourse appears
to derive from the fact that texts, of whatever length, come to an
end. . . . Thus the guiding notions of Gadamer's hermeneu-
tics ... all reveal their origin in a fundamental tendency that has
its motivation in the experience of reading, namely, a tendency
toward 'wholeness' and plenitude. (348-349)

The printed book provides a closure that dialogue does not, which renders

the latter less controllable and therefore less likely to yield to notions of

finality and unity. Prosopopoeia, therefore, as a trope of literacy, evokes the

specters of (phal)logocentrism which fully participates in, or as Luce Irigaray

might say, "penetrates," the ideology of depth.

So it is no surprise that Spenser would find the prospects of print

literacy a questionable blessing, since his perspective is situated in the

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moment of transition, a moment for him of relative darkness. On the one
hand, print offers both him and his patrons the kind of monumental fame
that appealed to his ambition; on the other hand, the depth that print allows
one to achieve is as frightening to him as the prospect of virtual reality and
cyberspace technologies is to scholars, myself included, invested in the
apparatus of print. His fear is reflected in ours.29

On the literary plain of battle, the Red Cross Knight will yield to Don
Quixote, the advent of the novel and of a realism which would usher in,
soon after, the hegemony of the symbol and Romantic ideologies of authority
and textuality. Allegory will come to be called "stupid and frivolous"30
during the 500 year period of print literacy's reign, but with the return in the
twentieth century of a concern for language and the pan-disciplinary
consideration of linguistic questions that followed, allegory is making a come-
back in literary theory and artistic practice. One reason for this is the very
nature of the new technologies that include if not primarily foreground
images in their "writing" and even recognize that letters themselves are
images. Another reason derives from both the pressure that poststructural
theorists have applied to language, examining as they do the centrality of

29In a special issue of the electronic journal Surfaces focusing on the impact of the Internet upon
scholarship, James J. O'Donnell writes, "We live in an age of media transition not unlike that
which ushered in the print culture so familiar to us all. It is instructive to compare the
objections raised in those days to print with those raised now to electronic media: the
resemblances are eery. Just last week, 1 had a Marxist literary scholar saying to me words that
quite unconsciously and quite faithfully echoed the lament of a 15th century Benedictine abbot
for the threatened decay of the medieval scriptorium. For the objections raised in both ages
speak not so much to real drawbacks in the new medium as to the threat they pose to the
existing social order" (5).

30This phrase comes from Jorges Luis Borges's scathing indictment of allegory in his essay
"From Allegories to Novels," in which he writes, "I know that at one time the allegorical art
was considered quite charming (the labyrinthine Roman de la Rose, which survives in two
hundred manuscripts, consists of twenty-four thousand verses) and is now intolerable. We feel
that, besides being intolerable, it is stupid and frivolous" (155-56).

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metaphor in determining cognitive behavior, and the Derridean emphasis on
picto-ideo-phonographic writing that has resulted from such inquiry.

I will now turn to a consideration of the role poststructuralism has
played in the return of allegory as a preface to theorizing hypertext composi-
tion based on Deleuzoguattarian concepts of the rhizome. Electronic rhetoric,
I will suggest in the next chapter, is inherently allegorical, given the possibil-
ities for juxtaposition, typographical irony, and iconographic representation,
and this factor explains my consideration of the Art of Memory (and
Spenser's use of it in The Faerie Queene) as an allegorical tradition of
information storage practiced prior to the age of the printed book. The Art of
Memory may provide a form of information storage that is fruitful in
negotiating textual production in the new age of allegory in the emergent
electronic era. In the same way that Spenser straddled two mnemonic
systems in his writings, one being the memory palace tradition and the other
being the emerging mnemonics of print literacy, writers of electronic docu-
ments straddle both the passing mnemonics of print and the emerging
mnemonics of the electronic era. It will thus be necessary in the next chapter
to consider how "residual literacy," to adapt Ong's popular phrase, occurs in
human-computer interface design as well as the interface of certain hypertexts
as a way of highlighting the effect of cultural inertia upon current design
strategies. My purpose in doing so will be to suggest that Spenser's textuality,
as a representative of the allegorical tradition and of the forgotten method of
the memory palace, will be more appropriate to the "writing space" of
electronic media than to that of print literacy. If Cervantes's Don Quixote
dominated the field of print, it was only because Spenser's Red Cross Knight
did not have as much to offer the apparatus of alphabetic literacy. But insofar
as hypertext will be an electronic technology that will encourage picto-ideo-

135

phonographic writing, Spenser and the memory palace tradition, as partici-
pants in allegorical writing, will have something to offer the twenty-first
century textual composer. The next chapter will take up the question of how
such an offering might be accepted.

CHAPTER 4
THE AGE OF ELECTRONIC COMPOSITION

The Return of Allegory and the Privileging of the Surface

Jorge Luis Borges, writing about the decline of allegory in the age of
print literacy, asks, after considering its past popularity in the Middle Ages
and characterizing its present status as a "stupid and frivolous" genre, "How
can I explain the difference in outlook without simply appealing to the
principle of changing tastes?" (156). The discussion at the close of my third
chapter, however, suggests that forces greater than mere taste were behind
this decline in status that allegory experienced. But Borges' statement, as far
as it is acceptable, implies the possibility of a reversal in taste, and this is what
I will suggest has occurred in the aesthetic and theoretical sensibility of
twentieth-century artists and philosophers. Evidence for this change in taste
ranges from the presence of allegory in the graphic novels of popular culture1
to the canvas texts of Rauschenberg and the resurrection of the baroque by
Walter Benjamin and Gilles Deleuze.2 This change in taste may also be a
result of the emergence of electronic media which, as I will soon show,

!See, for instance, the recent issues in the DC Vertigo line, such as Mercy, The Enigma, Death:
The High Cost of Living, and The Sandman, each of which personify the title figures in
typical allegorical fashion. The medieval genre of the mystery play itself has been evoked in
a recent issue entitled Mystery Play, which incorporates the medieval form of allegory as a
way of inaugurating the narrative.

2See Deleuze, The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque and Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic
Drama. For commentary on Rauschenberg as an allegorist, see Owens, "The Allegorical
Impulse."

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contain the potential for student and scholarly composition of allegorical
forms of textuality. I hope to encourage the recognition of this allegorical
potential of the electronic technologies, and I suggest with this chapter that
the overlap into current literary and aesthetic theory will guide institutional
practices into a more overtly allegorical pedagogy, both in terms of its form
and its content.3

Part of the reason for the return of allegory results from the recognition
by literary theorists of symbol's role in the Romantic conception of aesthetic
sensibility and their subsequent desire to undermine that role. Insofar as the
symbol came to be considered as an organic, unified form of signification
superior to allegory and its arbitrary form of signification, it displaced allegory
as the dominant trope in the making of meaning. Opposed to the superficial
relationship between allegorical signifier and its signified, a relationship said
to be imposed upon the referent by the author, is the more profound
connection that symbol implies, with its "natural" synecdochic reference
"growing" out of itself. I consciously used the evaluative terms "superficial"
and "profound" in the previous sentence to highlight the implied metaphors
of surface and depth at the root of the connotative associations normally
employed: superficial is used in the sense of "comprehending only what is
apparent or obvious" but primarily means "of, affecting, or being on or near
the surface"; profound is used in the sense of "thorough-going, far-reaching"
and "penetrating beyond what is superficial or obvious" but primarily means

3See, for instance, Ulmer's Applied Grammatology, appropriately subtitled Post(e)-Pedagogy
from Joseph Beuys to Jacques Derrida. Ulmer argues for a pedagogy based upon the experi-
mental arts of the twentieth century, one that invokes the mnemonic possibilities of perfor-
mance art and poststructural punning: "The task of applied grammatology is to introduce this
[picto-ideo-phonographic] Writing into the classroom (and eventually into research communi-
cation in the form of video tapes)" (242). And elsewhere, he writes, "An AG [Applied
Grammatological] lecture (seminar-performance) will include the equivalent of 'non-diegetic
inserts,' that is, it will mount scientific information in its discourse which will have the status
not of disciplinary content but of metaphor . . ." (287).

138

"situated at, extended to, or coming from a great depth." Benjamin recog-
nizes this dynamic associating symbolism with depth and profundity in
"Allegory and Trauerspiel," a dynamic which pervades the way art
commentators discuss their subject:

This [notion of the symbol], which is the one used in the field of
theology, could never have shed that sentimental twilight over
the philosophy of beauty which has become more and more
impenetrable since the end of early romanticism. But it is
precisely this illegitimate talk of the symbolic which permits the
examination of every artistic form "in depth", and has an
immeasurably comforting effect on the practice of investigation
into the arts. (159-160)

Benjamin views the hegemony of the symbol in terms of the "tyranny of a
usurper who came to power in the chaos which followed in the wake of
romanticism" (159), and he identifies the theological motivation (Derrida
would call it "transcendental signification") residing in the association
between symbolism and depth. As a way of undermining this hegemony,
Benjamin returns to the baroque as a period in the history of art when artists
indulged in allegorical representation.

To understand this resurrection of allegory, then, we must consider the
return of the surface as a privileged metaphor. This return is in part attribut-
able to the renewed emphasis on language that poststructural theory has
fostered in literary criticism, an emphasis which directs us to attend to the
surface of language. The playful aspect of the pun exemplifies this attention
to the surface of the letter, and its reputation in popular consciousness as the
"lowest form of humor" demonstrates its association with "superficiality."
Derrida and Lacan are the best-known of the poststructural philosophers to
use the pun in their writing, and their use elevates its status from the lowest
form of humor to a rhetorical device recognized for its potential power as a

139

way of multiplying the polysemy of language.4 In her attempt to define
allegory, Maureen Quilligan identifies this very aspect of language use as
being fundamental to a genre "which consistently pays the most profound
attention to the radical significance of that much-dismissed literal surface"
(29). Elsewhere she writes, "Wordplay is an organic part of the genre . . ." (46),
since "the effect of wordplay is to make readers self-conscious of reading by
indicating the primary importance of the verbal surface rather than the
imagined action" (254).

It is the "much-dismissed literal surface" that Derrida refuses to forget
in his conscious attempt to remember the forgotten meanings buried in
words and to write with all of these meanings at once.5 Derrida writes
elsewhere of the surface, in his discussion of the crypt in "Fors: The Anglish
Words of Nicholas Abraham and Maria Torok." Hillis Miller's reading of
Derrida's discussion in "Derrida's Topographies" asserts that wordplay is a
necessary part of literary discourse in that it creates a crypt of secrets, a
secretive language that never reveals its secrets. This explains from Miller's
point of view the deconstructive desire to view all writing as literary, as
harboring a signified that is problematized by the impenetrable surface-effects
of tropological language.6 As Hillis Miller writes, "Derrida's current way of

4See Ulmer's discussion of the "puncept," which he derives from his consideration of Derrida,
in his article "The Puncept in Grammatology."

5Such is the injunction of Ulmer's Heuretics: The Logic of Invention, in which he offers the
following principle of the new form of writing he calls "chorography": "do not choose between
the different meanings of key terms, but compose by using all the meanings . . ." (48). For an
exercise in writing chorographically, see Scholes, Comley and Ulmer's Text Book, chapter four,
which presents an assignment based upon Derrida's recognition of the signature effect in certain
writers.

6Hillis Miller writes, "To turn whatever is written 'on' into literature, in the particular way in
which Derrida associates literature with undecidability, inviolable secrecy, and the
irresponsibility that is the most exigent responsibility, might even be said to be the

deconstructive move par excellence Deconstruction, it can be said, if there is such a thing, is

the exposure of the literary in every utterance, writing, or graphic mark" (20).

140

saying this is to argue that all literature harbors a secret. The secret is an

essential feature of literature" (16). Wordplay is not playful so much as

necessary — "its bizarre turns of phrase, its syntactical equivocations, its

outward resemblances [ses dehors ressemblants ]. By 'dehors ressemblants' I

take it Derrida means the figurative or tropological surface of the language

necessary to talk about the crypt — for example, his own language about

cement and caulking" (15). Here, the tropological is viewed as an inherently

superficial aspect of language, one that plays with and on the surface of

language as it keeps the secret of an ultimate meaning that never will be

revealed by the language without imposing a hermeneutic gesture of

interpretation, which confinines the polysemous play of the words

themselves to a single, rational, revealed meaning.

So to preserve literature as literature, literary critics reading such

literature in order to interpret it must allow the text to have these secrets

without wanting to know what these secrets are, one reason being the

practical one that they are impossible to dis-cover. The "meaning(s)" reside

on the surface, in the language itself, on the level of the signifier, rather than

in the depth of the signified:

Literature eternally keeps its secrets, and the secret is an essential
feature of literature. If the secret tells us something essential
about literature, literature on the other hand tells us something
essential about the secret. It tells us that the true secret, if there is
such a thing, is not hidden somewhere, in some place from
which it might in principle be wrested, recovered, uncovered.
A true secret is all on the surface. This superficiality cannot by
any hermeneutic procedures, material or linguistic, be gone
behind. A literary text (and any text may be taken as literary) says

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what it says. It cannot be forced to say more than it says.7
(Hillis Miller, "Derrick's Topographies" 17)

Those involved in a hermeneutic search for the transcendental signified

behind or underlying the surface of language, those trying to "force" it "to say

more than it says," conveniently forget the "much-dismissed" surface. With

Derrida's challenge to the 2500 year hegemony of hermeneutics inaugurated

by Plato, this forgotten surface of the letter, of the literal, returns — and some

would say with a vengeance.

Craig Owens notes an equation between allegory and Writing

(capitalized to indicate the kind of surface-oriented, picto-ideo-phonogram-

matic writing that Derrida calls for) based on their similar suppression at the

hand of Platonic essentializing.8 This essentializing, Owens asserts (following

Benjamin), is a common denominator in both the privileging of the symbol

over allegory and the privileging of voice over writing — what Derrida calls

7This description of the "true secret" being all on the surface is similar to Richard Rambuss's
assessment of Spenser's secrets in The Shepheardes Calender. In "The Secretary's Study: The
Secret Designs of The Shepheardes Calender, " Richard Rambuss discusses The Shepheardes
Calender as being the showcase of an "empty secret," which stores not an actual secret but only
the fact that there is a secret. Such might be considered one ultimate goal of poststructural
philosophy (if it can be said to have a unified goal) and the grammatological mobilization of
this philosophy: the foregrounding of the secret within the unconscious, the mapping of a logic
of the unconscious, the writing of a rhetoric of dream-work. As Ulmer writes in Heuretics, "The
part of Kristeva's theory most important for chorography is her understanding of the chora
function as a process or movement of invention, conducted as a transgression of rules (the
burlesque principle) that undermine the plausibility and verisimilitude of classic mimesis,
argumentation, judgment, realism. Choral writing is a kind of Dream Work (hence the
usefulness of psychoanalysis for theorizing her poetics), drawing not only on condensation and
displacement (metaphor and metonymy), but especially on a third process— 'the passage from
one sign system to another '" (176).

8I deliberately invoke the hand in this line to recall Goldberg's critique, in the last chapter of
Writing Matter, of the "hand in theory," how an apparently poststructural philosopher like
Barthes re-inscribes logocentrism by emphasizing the materiality of writing with the hand.
The hand is the source of the metaphor of "grasping" which signifies comprehension.
"[Barthes'] desire for the pen is a logocentric desire; writing by hand betrays its essentialism; it
puts the hand in mind; it transforms the hand into the mind" (285). Later he writes, "Speech is
a derivative effect of the labor of the hand, through which primitive community is founded
. . ." (314).

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"phonocentrism": "It is of course within the same philosophic tradition

which subordinates writing to speech that allegory is subordinated to the

symbol. It might be demonstrated, from another perspective, that the

suppression of allegory is identical with the suppression of writing" (215).

Writing of the kind that attends to the surface, then, manifests what Owens

calls an "allegorical impulse" because in allegory, "the image is a hieroglyph,

an allegory is a rebus — writing composed of concrete images" (209).9 One is

reminded of Derrida's consideration of the hieroglyph in part one of Of

Grammatology and its result for the advent of Writing:

By a hardly perceptible necessity, it seems as though the concept
of writing — no longer indicating a particular, derivative, auxil-
iary form of language in general (whether understood as
communication, relation, expression, signification, constitution
of meaning or thought, etc.), no longer designating the exterior
surface, the insubstantial double of a major signifier, the
signifier of the signifier — is beginning to go beyond the exten-
sion of language. (6-7)

For Derrida, the return of the surface that occurs with a return of the allegor-
ical impulse — a return of picto-ideo-phonographic Writing — paradoxically
undermines the surface-depth distinction, as all that is left is a textual
network of signifiers that do not point to signifieds but only to other
signifiers: "There is not a single signified that escapes, even if recaptured, the
play of signifying references that constitute language. The advent of writing
is the advent of this play . . ." (7).10

9Benjamin attributes the sixteenth-century resurgence of allegory to the discovery of the
mysterious Egyptian hieroglyphs, which resulted in the writing of books of iconology and
emblem books. Here, Benjamin quotes Usener. "Under the leadership of the artist-scholar,
Albertus, the humanists thus began to write with concrete images (rebus ) instead of letters; the
word "rebus" thus originated on the basis of the enigmatic hieroglyphs, and medallions,
columns, triumphal arches, and all the conceivable artistic objects produced by the Renaissance,
were covered with such enigmatic devices" (169).

10Derrida notes elsewhere this paradoxical effect of an orientation to language which denies
the presence of the signified. See, for instance, his discussion of the Chora as quoted in Ulmer's
Heuretics : "Everything inscribed in [the Chora] erases itself immediately, while remaining in

143

The insight Owens offers later in his essay that is most helpful to my

project of trying to discover an electronic rhetoric parallels allegory with

filmic writing. While film is not "electronic" per se, its strategies of montage

and juxtaposition, its composition by means of fragments, make it similar to

both video and hypertext composition. The capacity of hypertext, or better,

hypermedia, to sustain sound, graphics, and now "quick-time video" (short

portions of video that play on the computer screen) brings to hypermedia

considerations once confined to the film-maker. But it is the presence of the

image, the "pictogram," that for Owens defines film as allegorical:

[T]hat film should be the primary vehicle for modern allegory
may be attributed not only to its unquestioned status as the most
popular of contemporary art forms, but also to its mode of
representation. Film composes narratives out of a succession of
concrete images, which make it peculiarly suited to allegory's
essential pictogrammatism. (230)

To draw a cause-effect relationship between the emergence of electronic

technologies and the current challenge to Platonic logocentrism is

unnecessary, as one can attribute both phenomenon to some kind of

"epistemological shift" that is in the process of playing itself out not only in

the humanities but also in the sciences.11 Such a move does not make the

mistake of citing one as the cause of the other but sees both as being caused by

larger cultural forces. At any rate, there has been a general return to Greek

it. It is thus an impossible surface — it is not even a surface, because it has no depth" (65).
Hillis Miller also notes this paradox in his discussion of "Derrida's Topographies": "To say
literature is an ideal object is the same thing as to say it always hides an inviolable secret
because it is always a matter of a surface without depth. The reader cannot go behind it, or
beneath it, or before and after it. Literature keeps its secret, but on the surface" (18).

1JN. Katherine Hayles notes as much in the preface to her book The Cosmic Web: "We are
living amid the most important conceptual revolution since Copernicus argued that the earth
was not the center of the universe. ... In this book I have singled out the 'field concept' as the
theme that is at the heart of this revolution, and have examined its various manifestations in
the models of physics and mathematics, the theories of the philosophy of science and
linguistics, and the structure and strategies of literary texts" (9).

144

philosophy as a way of negotiating our current moment.12 In terms of

poststructural philosophy, this return has entailed a search for philosophical

alternatives to the hegemony of the Platonic "epoch." Eric Charles White, for

instance, in Kaironomia: On the Will to Invent, returns to Sophists such as

Gorgias for the exposition of an "antimetaphysical metaphysic" which finds

its resurrection in the texts of recent philosophers like Derrida, Barthes, and

de Man. White introduces the idea of metonymy in a discussion of the

poststructural perception of the fragmented self and its revision of Freud's

idea of the "middle voice"; he characterizes kaironomic thought, a thought

which is "invested in the present" and which implies a "rhetorical practice in

which intention emerges in response to a particular situation," as

metonymic, as oriented to the surface :

The disruptive agency of metonymy suggests an aesthetic of
surfaces, of abrupt shifts and juxtapositions, a movement of
thought in which desiring energy is invested in the present.
Instead of the reflexive dream of purely habitual uninventive
behavior, it implies a rhetorical practice in which the speaker's
intention emerges in response to the particular situation. (56-57)

White here valorizes metonymy as a way of arguing for a sophistic rhetoric of

invention. His relation of the Sophists' philosophy to that of contemporary

French poststructuralism locates another reference to the return of the

surface. The description of metonymy as an aesthetic of "abrupt shifts" and

"juxtapositions" reinforces the filmic/electronic aspect of this poststructural

orientation to the surface.

12One example of this can be seen in Lanham's recent book entitled The Electronic Word:
Democracy, Technology, and the Arts. One book review of this is titled, "The Ancient Road to
Hypertext: A scholar finds links between the Greek Sophists and today's information revolu-
tion." See Bernard Sharratt, "The Ancient Road to Hypertext," rev. of The Electronic Word by
Richard Lanham, The Neiv York Times Book Review 28 Nov. 1993: 2.

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The surface also returns in a second example of the poststructural

revival of a Greek philosophy other than Platonic, manifesting another

instance of the contemporary desire to overcome Plato's pervasive influence

in philosophic thought. Gilles Deleuze, in The Logic of Sense, calls for

consideration of the Stoic philosophy because "[t]he Stoics discovered surface

effects" (7). Deleuze also discovers the surface in the works of Lewis Caroll.

Like the Stoics, Carroll is an inventor of paradoxes, which is significant in

terms of the surface-depth distinction because "[p]aradox appears as a

dismissal of depth, a display of events at the surface, and a deployment of

language along this limit" (9).13 The progression that Deleuze notes in

Through the Looking Glass parallels the displacement of depth as a

privileged metaphor and the replacement of the surface that I have discussed

above:

As one advances in the story, however, the digging and hiding
gives way to a lateral sliding from right to left and left to right.
The animals below ground become secondary, giving way to card
figures which have no thickness. One could say that the old
depth having been spread out became width. The becoming
unlimited is maintained entirely within this inverted width.
"Depth" is no longer a complement. Only animals are deep, and

13Ronald Bogue is helpful in understanding how Deleuze's philosophy of the "surface-effect"
is relevant to the discussion above of poststructural notions of language: "Once unanchored, the
Stoic system becomes a powerful tool for exploring the relationship between surfaces and
depths, problems and bodies. But most important, the concept of the incorporeal affords
Deleuze a point of entry into the investigation of language and meaning, for the Stoics regard
both linguistics and logic as disciplines concerned exclusively with incorporeals. . . . For the
Stoics, words are bodies, in that they are sonic entities that possess real being. A word as sonic
body, however, is the same entity for those who understand it as for those who do not (such as
foreigners). That which makes a word understandable to one individual and not to another is
its meaning, an incorporeal attribute which is added to the word and which in no way affects
the word's being as a body. Both words and things, then, are bodies upon whose surfaces
incorporeal lekta 'insist' or 'subsist', the surface effects of words being 'meaning', and those of
things, 'events'" (68-69).

146

they are not the noblest for that; the noblest are the flat
animals.14 (9)

As an alternative to the Platonic philosophy of the heights and the

Nietzschean philosophy of the depths, Deleuze offers a philosophy of the

surface, which is no less than "a reorientation of all thought and of what it

means to think: there is no longer depth or height " (130). The emblem of

this new way of thinking will be Hercules, hero of Seneca's tragedies:

He always ascends or descends to the surface in every conceiv-
able manner. He brings back the hell-hound and the celestial
hound, the serpent of hell and the serpent of the heavens. It is
no longer a question of Dionysus down below, or Apollo up
above, but of Hercules of the surface, in his dual battle against
both depth and height: reorientation of the entire thought and
a new geography. (132)

Such a position might be criticized as perverse by one invested in the ideology

of depth, an ideology whose metaphor is strengthened in the culture of print.

Deleuze has, in his more recent work, continued this focus on the

surface, finding in Leibniz's baroque philosophy of the fold a figure of the

kind of thinking and perceiving he is trying to enact. Deleuze views Leibniz

as an anti-Cartesian philosopher trying to override his philosophy of the

separability of parts, or what one scientist calls "the atomistic machine view

of the world"15; in its stead, Leibniz offers a philosophy of the fluid, a vision

14Deleuze notes in an endnote that "The discovery of the surface and this critique of depth
represent a constant in modern literature. They inspire the work of Robbe-Grillet. In another
form, we find them again in Klossowski . . ." (336, note 7).

15"Descartes's error probably concerns what is to be found in different areas. He believed that
the real distinction between parts entailed separability. What specifically defines an
absolute fluid is the absence of coherence or cohesion; that is, the separability of parts, which
in fact applies only to a passive and abstract matter" (The Fold 5). For an account of how this
Cartesian perspective governed the birth of the paradoxical science of fluid "mechanics," see
Hayles, "Gender Encoding in Fluid Mechanics." I derive the phrase in quotation marks from
R.C Lewontin: "We have become so used to the atomistic machine view of the world that
originated with Descartes that we have forgotten that it is a metaphor. We no longer think, as
Descartes did, that the world is like a clock. We think it is a clock. We cannot imagine an
alternative view unless it be one that goes back to a prescientific era" (Biology as Ideology 14).

147

of a matter that is connected rather than merely a result of the juncture of
parts: "a flexible or an elastic body still has cohering parts that form a fold,
such that they are not separated into parts of parts but are rather divided to
infinity in smaller and smaller folds that always retain a certain cohesion"
(The Fold 6). This is a vision of matter that would very much appeal to the
Deleuze of A Thousand Plateaus, who takes comfort in concepts that try to
realize the spaces in between, that recognize the continuities rather than the
discontinuities between things, whether they be the special relationship that a
wasp and orchid develop or the geologic mobility of strata in flux.16 The
point most helpful to my argument here is that the concept of the fold attends
to the surfaces of matter, viewing all of it as surface: "Unfolding sometimes
means that I am developing — that I am undoing — infinite tiny folds that are
forever agitating the background, with the goal of drawing a great fold on the
side whence forms appear; it is the operation of a vigil: I project the world
'on the surface of a folding . . .'" (The Fold 93). The concept of the fold is a
concept entailing an endless surface-effect.

The Fold is also helpful in that Deleuze recognizes the baroque
philosophy of Leibniz as a manifestation of allegory; his return to Leibniz's
philosophy therefore participates in this general poststructural return to
allegory.17 He points to Benjamin's essay on "Allegory and Trauerspiel" as a
key moment in the re-emergence of the baroque: "Walter Benjamin made a
decisive step forward in our understanding of the Baroque when he showed

16For the clearest account of the wasp and the orchid, see Deleuze and Parnet 6-7. For Deleuze
and Guattari's perceptions of stratification, see A Thousand Plateaus 40-74.

17"And if it is true that appertaining— belonging to— is the key to allegory, then Leibniz's
philosophy must be conceived as the allegory of the world, the signature of the world, but no
longer as the symbol of a cosmos in the former manner. In this respect the formula of the
Monadology, that 'components symbolize with simple units,' far from marking a return to the
symbol, indicates the transformation or translation of the symbol into allegory" (The Fold
127).

148

that allegory was not a failed symbol, or an abstract personification, but a
power of figuration entirely different from that of the symbol . . ." (125). His
stated goal of "stretching [the Baroque] outside of its historical limits" (34)
presents a desire to recognize the importance both of the baroque in art and of
Leibniz in philosophy; such a desire demonstrates what Owens would call an
allegorical impulse insofar as "[c]ombinations of the visible and the legible
make up 'emblems' or allegories dear to the Baroque sensibility" (Deleuze,
The Fold 31). As such, Deleuze will be, I wish to propose, our mentor for the
articulation of an electronic rhetoric.

Deleuze's role in this articulation will become clearer if we recall the
grammatological analogy framing this exploration. The sixteenth century
saw the birth of the print culture that we see dying today; likewise, we are
witnessing the birth of electronic culture, or what Bolter calls "network
culture" in opposition to the culture of ideational hierarchy which emerges
from a print apparatus.18 As with any substantive change in a culture's
mnemonic strategies for information storage and retrieval, the stress of
transition causes some degree of anxiety among those participating in its
unfolding. But such stress is the necessary pressure that forges new
institutional practices. At the same time that Spenser was involved with the
invention of our current notions of authorship and authority, Peter Ramus
was transforming the use of the page as a mnemonic space, a transformation
which would result, as I have already pointed out, in the institutionalization
of the five-paragraph theme— a crystallization of the literate apparatus. But
the five-paragraph theme did not leap from the head of Ramus like a Greek
god; it developed over the centuries during which print literacy came to reign
supreme.

18See Writing Space 231-236.

149

One goal of a grammatological project such as this dissertation is to
recognize the historical nature of institutional practices in order better to
recognize the changes being undergone during our present moment.19 Such
recognition theoretically enables educators to intervene in a self-conscious
way to invent new institutional practices that exploit the advantages of the
current technologies of communication. In the same way that Ramus
released the potential for mnemonic efficiency inherent in the printed page, I
wish to release the potential inherent in the screen, specifically the screen of a
multi-media (or hypermedia /hypertext) computer. Ultimately, I will suggest
that Deleuze can provide a theory for the screen (computer and television) in
the same way that Ramus provided a theory of the page in the sixteenth
century with his new mnemonic system of the dichotomies, which exploited
the spatial potential of the page for a purely verbal mnemotechniques.

Before proceeding, in the next chapter, to a general theory of hypertext
composition derived from the philosophy of Deleuze, it will be necessary to
explore the "writing space" of the computer screen and to determine the
limitations of interface metaphors based on print literacy. While these are
fine as provisional devices meant to help us negotiate the transition from
print literacy to computeracy, they should at some point be discarded for
interface metaphors more appropriate to the potentials of the computer as a
medium that is ultimately different from the technology of the book.
Combined with a recognition of the potential in pre-Ramist mnemonics for
the imagistic media of the screen, Deleuzian theory will provide one site of
such metaphors.

19For a detailed account of the philosophical and historical foundations of the five-para-
graph theme, see Crowley, The Methodical Memory: Invention in Current-Traditional
Rhetoric.

150
Hypertext and the Visual Representation of Information

One goal of grammatology is the invention of institutional practices
that attempt to maximize the efficiency of information storage and retrieval
by considering how technologies of communication and institutional prac-
tices inform the manner in which information is stored. Grammatology also
considers the subject formation that results from this configuration and how
this participates in a feedback loop which affects further developments and
uses of the information technologies. Indeed, one axiom of poststructural
philosophy posits the dissolution of the unified subject, and its reconfigura-
tion in the electronic age is a popular topic among grammatologists of the
current transitional shift in communications technologies. While I wish to
acknowledge the necessity of considering the latter, my project more fully
embraces the former goal, with specific application to hypertext as the newest
writing space.

The strategy for achieving this goal entails an understanding of the
evolution of our current practices and the history of past practices, such as the
Art of Memory, which may avail themselves of reterritorialization in a
different set of rhetorical circumstances. This dissertation participates in the
grammatological project insofar as it is trying actively to intervene in the
current trajectory of hypertext rhetorical practice so that users will exploit the
full potential of the electronic apparatus. The purpose of this section is to
trace the history of the way information is spatially presented in different
material forms, with the goal of asserting that hypertext is a three-
dimensional medium that needs to be recognized as such. When it is treated
thus, hypertext writers (and their counterparts in cyberspace architecture) will

151

recognize the powerful potential of the memory palace as an information

storage strategy available to them as an organizational tool.

A grammatological history considers the material form that texts take

as manifestations of a particular communication technology and how this

form affects meaning. Roger Chartier, known for his work in addressing the

history of reading practices in France, leads us to such material considerations

of how producers of texts used the "writing space" of the page and how such

usage affected a text's legibility and, as a result, its reception. Aspects of the

text that we perhaps take for granted today, such as punctuation, page

numbers, margins, and the presence of space between words, were not always

conventional practices but had to be invented over time. Chartier comments

on the creation of a "new horizon of reception" when modifications to the

physical form of the book created a product that was more manageable, more

readable for those unlearned in paleography, thereby enabling the general

public to access more readily the book's contents:

The same is true, on a greater scale, of the greatest change in the
way texts were cast into print between the sixteenth and the
eighteenth centuries, "the definitive triumph of white over
black" — that is, the introduction of breathing space on to the
page by the use of more paragraphs to break up an uninterrupted
continuous text and by paragraph indentations that make the
order of discourse immediately visible. (11)

Bolter, too, notes this phenomenon, calling them changes to the "soft struc-
tures," which are "those visually determined units and relationships that are
written on or in the hard structures."

Soft structures [more often] change without a change in
materials. The medieval codex permitted remarkable changes in
the visual presentation of text: through the creation of new
scripts and through the gradual development of punctuation,
marginalia, and marks of emphasis and organization. Today,
the technology of print has a large repertoire of soft structures
that have evolved over hundreds of years. (41)

152

While the most significant changes were put in place during the manuscript
culture of the Middle Ages, as Bolter notes, the age of print fixed these
conventions as well as others heretofore fluid, such as spelling, word
meaning, and pronunciation.

Carruthers elaborates on the transformation of the page as a writing
space in the Middle Ages. She tells of the various mnemonic strategies
employed by Christian monks for the memorization of sacred texts, since this
was one of their monastic tasks.20 One method instructed monks to break up
the space of the page into a grid upon which one could then place numbers.
One would then break down the text to be memorized and associate each part
with the concordant number. This numbering system could be applied at the
macro- and micro-levels as well: "Under [psalm] number twenty-two, for
example, one visualizes a subsidiary set of numbers, again beginning with
'one' and proceeding in consecutive numerical order; to these one attaches
the rest of the text. . . . The crucial task for recollection is the construction of
the orderly grid of numbers which one can see in the memory" (82). While
every Christian was expected to have memorized the psalms, this method
was applicable to other texts as well and was, by the time of the Middle Ages, a
common technique: "There are a number of other sources and practices
current throughout the Middle Ages which indicate that both the numerical
grid system and mnemonic value of page layout were well known . . ." (95).

20Francis Wormald describes the giving out of books to the brethren on Monday after the first
Sunday after Lent: "Before the brethren go in to the chapter, the librarian should have all the
books save those given out for reading the previous year collected on a carpet in the chapter-
house; last year's books should be carried in by those who have had them. ... the librarian
shall then read out the list of the books which the brethren had in the previous year. When
each hears his name read out he shall return the book which was given him to read, and
anyone who has not read in full the book he received shall confess his fault prostrate and ask
for pardon." Francis Wormald, The Year 1200: A Background Survey, 11 (New York:
Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1970), 170. Excerpted in Journal of Typographic Research 4 (1970),
336.

153

This attention to page layout, a form of two-dimensional representa-
tion of knowledge, became more common as the Middle Ages progressed,
according to Carruthers. The use of columns drawn on the page served to
separate the information into sections so that it could be arranged spatially in
the memory: "the effect is to divide the page into a series of small rectangular
'bins,' none holding more than five items. Such a layout is clearly designed
for mnemonic ease" (93). This practice recalls the Art of Memory as practiced
from the time of antiquity: "places" on the page holding images, or, in this
case, words. But the difference is that, rather than having an imagined (or
remembered) three-dimensional space — such as one's garden or room, for
instance — in which one locates a number of designated loci meant to serve as
repositories of mnemonic imagines, one now has a flat, two-dimensional
grid.21 Here, a transformation of the practice occurs on the material level of
the page; practitioners of the Art of Memory adapted it to the written page as a
technology of the manuscript culture's apparatus.

Members of manuscript culture transformed the Art of Memory in
other ways, too, keeping the general dictum of using images in places but
changing the focus again from the use of imaginary images (images conjured
in the mind) to the use of actual visual images depicted in the margins of the
page. These marginal images, then, ostensibly serving the purpose of page
decoration, also have a mnemonic function (Carruthers 130). Their charac-
teristics often share the grotesque or startling features of their classical

21 This changed understanding of the nature of the mnemonic 'locus' — from a three-dimension-
al room, in which perspective changes as one 'walks' through it mentally, to a two-dimensional
cell within a grid on a flat surface— may account for some of the confusion medieval writers had
in understanding Tully's rules about the making of backgrounds (these gave them more trouble
than the ones about the making of images). 'Locus' for Cicero was a space with depth and
variable perspective; for Hugh of St. Victor, 'locus' was a position on a page that could be
'viewed' only frontally" (Carruthers 129).

154

counterparts: the prevalence of scatological depictions of nuns worshipping

defecating anuses or the use of feces as gifts or bowling balls suggests the

extent of these images.22 The presence of fantastic animals in the margins

also indicates that bestiaries fulfilled the mnemonic function of making the

page memorable. As lexicons of allegorical lore surrounding birds and

animals, lore which often figured the ethical values that infused the kinds of

texts monks were memorizing, these bestiaries became a fund of loaded

images for textual producers and consumers alike.23 Descriptions of the

beasts and the birds were therefore graphic enough to make them likely

candidates for images to be placed in a person's loci, as Beryl Rowland writes

in the following passage:

Indeed, the bestiary may have owed its popularity in part to
the facility with which it might be remembered. For here were
the imagines agentes, each one in its place and with its accus
tomed rubric that externalized the rhetorician's chambers of
memory. (Rowland 20)

What one sees here in the above transformations of mnemonic

practice is the use of the book as a mnemonic prosthesis: operations once

carried out in the mind — the construction of images and the placement of

these images in pre-established places in memory — are now carried out on

the page itself. Carruthers is clear about this classification: quoting Isidore of

Seville, she concludes that "Writing is a servant to memory, a book its

22Michael Camille writes, "Of all aspects of medieval culture it is perhaps the currency of
scatology, the constant playing with faeces in text and image, that is hardest for us to under-
stand. The margins of manuscripts are literally full of it" (111). For illustrations of such
marginalia, see Image on the Edge: The Margins of Medieval Art, pp. 45, 50, 112, 113.

23Carruthers views their usage in pedagogical contexts as being more mnemonic in scope than
anything else: "What the Bestiary taught most usefully in the long term of a medieval edu-
cation was not 'natural history' or moralized instruction ... but mental imaging, the systematic
forming of 'pictures' that would stick in the memory and could be used, like rebuses,
homophonies, imagines renim, and other sorts of notae, to mark information within the grid [of
the page]" (127).

155

extension. . . . writing is an activity of remembering" (111). This begins a
process of reifying the memory that ends with what Sharon Crowley calls
"the methodical memory," that is, a method for assisting the memory to
express itself clearly and distinctly. The five-paragraph theme, Crowley
writes, becomes the culmination of method as a locating of what is inside the
mind outside on the page (as one chapter title suggests: "How the Insides Get
Outside Again: The Logic of the Methodical Memory"): "Such an
arrangement would jog the memories of both rhetor and audience, since it
would mirror the way ideas had been stored there in the first place" (The
Methodical Memory 44).

Crowley recognizes the role that Peter Ramus plays in inaugurating the
methodical memory, which makes his iconoclastic system of mnemonics the
grandfather of the five-paragraph theme. I have already treated the effect of
Protestant iconoclasm and the Ramist-Brunian debates upon the memory
palace tradition in chapter 2. One point that needs to be emphasized again in
this context concerns the stripping of images from the mnemonic process:
whereas in the medieval manuscript practices we see the imagines agentes,
once only fabricated in the mind, reified in the margins of the page, with the
Ramist dichotomies we see only words spatially arranged on the page. Images
are stripped from this process.24 With Ramus, then, the two-dimensional
surface of the page is used in a manner similar to the medieval manuscript
writers, who employed page layout as a way of organizing information.25 His

24One notable exception to this phenomenon was the emblem-book tradition, which, as the
previously cited Coates essay suggests, attracted even Protestants like Theodore Beza as a
genre with a visual emphasis similar to the memory palace tradition which was under so much
attack at that time.

25Carruthers takes issue with Ong on this very point. She finds his claim that Ramus's
dichotomies represent a "general, unconscious veering toward the visual and 'objective' which
marks the Gutenberg and post-Gutenberg epoch" (Ramus 108) to be reductive, given the scope
and results of her own study: "My study will make it clear that from the earliest times

156

diagrammatic strategy of arranging information in sets of dichotomies
charted on the page ultimately evolves into the outline that precedes a final
written essay, but even this evokes the Ramist ethic, with its paragraphs
composed of topics.

The two-dimensional space of the page comes to be a space devoid of
images in Ramism; the information stored on the mnemonic prosthetic of
the page is solely verbal. One reason for this can be attributed to the
exigencies of the printing press: the beautiful hand-made marginal art of
medieval manuscripts requires individual care and attention to each produc-
tion, which a manuscript culture cultivates. Print culture, on the other hand,
in its infancy during the Age of Ramus and Spenser, encourages mechanical
reproduction rather than hand-crafted marginal artistry. It has even been
suggested that the book was the first assembly-line industry, pre-dating the
industrial revolution by centuries.26 This condition encourages the
elimination of images, since pages were being mass-produced rather than
individually made one at a time by an individual scribe. At the same time,
Ramus produces a system of dichotomies that eliminates images and arranges
words on the page in complicated hierarchical structures. The ability of the
printing press to duplicate these complicated diagrams that Ramus devised

medieval educators had as visual and spatial an idea of locus as any Ramist had, which they
inherited continuously from antiquity, and indeed that concern for the lay-out of memory
governed much in medieval education designed to aid the mind in forming and maintaining
heuristic formats that are both spatial and visualizable" (32). The point I wish to make here,
however, is that there is a difference that has to do with the replacement of the pictorial
image with the word in text that, while once ornamental and highly visual in itself, comes to
be more and more uniform.

26See Marshall McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy, the chapter entitled "The invention of
typography confirmed and extended the new visual stress of applied knowledge, providing the
first uniformly repeatable commodity, the first assembly-line, and the first mass-production"

(153-155).

157

leads Ong to conclude that it was instrumental in promoting the spatializing
feature of Ramist mnemonics.

Spatial constructs and models were becoming increasingly
critical in intellectual development. The changing attitude
manifested itself in the development of printing, in the new
Copernican way of thinking about space which would lead to
Newtonian physics, in the evolution of the painter's vision
climaxed by Jan van Eyck's use of the picture frame as a
diaphragm, and in the topical logics of Rudolph Agricola and
Ramus, as well as in other phenomena. (83)

Ramus thus conceives the interface of the page in such a way that it enhances
the potential for information storage and retrieval within the apparatus of
print.

At the close of the twentieth century, however, there is a new
apparatus, one that will require a new interface to maximize its efficiency as
an information storage medium. This apparatus, whose technology is the
multi-media capacity of the newest computers on the market, is in its infancy
in respect to the promises of virtual reality (VR) apologists, though architects
are beginning to design structures with the aid of VR goggles that enable one
to experience the three-dimensionality of the building and the space that it
will become. One story has it that designers avoided an expensive problem by
viewing it first via VR goggles. At any rate, as this example suggests, the new
technology, when fully implemented, promises a three-dimensional virtual
space through which one will be able to move, manipulate "objects," and
encounter other "entities." As in the tradition of the memory palace, three-
dimensional structures will be built and images will be stored within them;
unlike the memory palace, these structures will not be imaginary, residing
only in the imagination, but will be "real" insofar as they will exist outside of
the mind, perhaps even as public places which more than one person can
inhabit at a time, and will be experienced directly by the user's senses.

158

If we give the name "virtual reality" or "cyberspace" to any computer-
based information space that is three or more dimensions, then hypertext, I
wish to argue, is a simple form of virtual reality or cyberspace in that it
provides the illusion of a three-dimensional medium. Macintosh's
"HyperCard" rubric, as one example of a hypertext program, invokes a three-
dimensional interface metaphor as a way of conceiving of the program: one
creates a stack of "cards" (they are even called HyperCard "stacks") that are
electronically linked one to the other via "buttons" which, when pressed, take
the user from one card to another.27 A second common hypertext program,
Eastgate Systems's Storyspace, also presents a three-dimensional interface,
though this one is not as obvious. Its interface for authoring consists of the
"writing space," which appears on the screen as a box with a title bar. Clicking
on the title bar allows an author to write within the space, storing there
whatever information is desired — text, graphic, quick-time video, and/or
sound. Clicking within the writing space opens up the space to allow the
author to store more boxes on the inside, potentially providing the effect of
"Chinese boxes" — boxes within boxes within boxes.

For example, if one imagines a computer screen with a single box in
the middle, box A, which appears to have two little boxes inside of it, boxes B
and C, clicking inside writing space A makes boxes B and C within it suddenly
appear to be the same size as A was. The effect, then, is that one has travelled
"into" the computer screen, traversing a distance, a space between box A and
boxes B and C which made B and C only appear to be smaller because they
were placed beyond the plane of the computer screen. To put it another way,

27 Alan Kay points out the limitations of the "hypercard" interface metaphor: "That wonder-
ful system, HyperCard, in spite of its great ideas, has some 'metaphors' that set my teeth on
edge. Four of them are 'stack,' 'card,' 'field,' and 'button.' In 'stack' we find grievously unnec-
essary limitations, not the least of which is the strange notion that only one stack can be in
front of us at a time" (200).

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if one views the computer screen as a plane, then box A would lie on the
plane nearest the computer user, while boxes B and C would lie on the first
plane just behind and parallel to the one with box A in it.

One early experiment in Storyspace did not employ this three-dimen-
sional potential of its interface, instead ignoring the possibility of "going
inside" the computer screen. Stuart Moulthrop's attempt to map the Borges
story entitled "The Garden of Forking Paths" fails to nest the storyspace boxes
within other boxes, leaving all of the boxes on one plane and thereby limiting
the experience of the reader to a two-dimensional experience of the space.28
One student reported the following after reading the text on the computer:

It seemed as though, with very few exceptions, "right" was the
only choice one could make in terms of movement within the
story. The "up" option always took you back to the beginning,
which was frustrating. ... It was an interesting experience, and if
there were more travel options (other than just "right"), I would
have enjoyed it more. (Moulthrop, "Reading" 128)

Had Moulthrop scripted the story using the third dimension beyond the

surface plane, embedding boxes within boxes, the student would have had

more travel options. The full potential of the medium as an information

space would thus have been employed, thereby providing a richer, more

enjoyable reading experience for the reader.

Such ambiguity does not exist with the other, more complicated

manifestations of electronic technology. The difference between these is also

a result of complexity. Allucquere Rosanne Stone offers a useful definition of

virtual reality which identifies its relationship to cyberspace: "VR, one of a

class of interactive spaces that are coming to be known by the general term

cyberspace, is a three-dimensional consensual locus ... in which data may be

28The results of this experiment are recorded in Moulthrop's essay in Hypermedia and Literary
Studies, eds. Paul Delaney and George P. Landow, 119-132. One can view the chart of his
"storyspace map" on p. 127.

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visualized, heard, and even felt" (84). As one can see, in this definition
virtual reality is a subset of cyberspace, as cyberspace can represent multiple
dimensions (or "n-dimensions") over the standard three or four which is the
province of virtual reality. Cyberspace therefore has the capacity for increased
complexity, for a more dense representation of information.29

In fact, the conflict among architects who are theorizing the way that
cyberspace should be structured concerns the degree to which cyberspace
should emulate reality (as virtual reality does). Benedikt is the strongest
proponent of the view that cyberspace should as closely resemble our
experience of "real" space as possible so as to minimize the potential
disorientation that free-floating passage through a computerized landscape of
information can produce, and his proposals direct cyberspace architects to
adopt such mimetic considerations in subsequent thinking about this issue.
Any deviations from real experience must be justified, according to him.30

29Michael Benedikt most clearly writes of the multiple variables of information that
cyberspace enables one to plot. A three-dimensional entity in cyberspace can, for example,
have more dimensions hidden from view that can be displayed by means of viewing the object
from a different perspective. As he writes, "we can deal with many of the problems of size and
shape 1 have mentioned by zooming in, getting closer. The object, enlarged in our view, is
isolated from the overall context. It might expand in inner detail, revealing complexity
indefinitely. Here we see intrinsic dimensions expand to become the extrinsic dimensions of the
object now extended enough to have space within it, to be a space" ("Cyberspace" 143). In this
quote, a "dimension" refers to a variable of information plotted in relation to other variables.
"Extrinsic" dimensions are the ones that are immediately visible; "intrinsic" dimensions are
those that are hidden from view and that require "unfolding" to be seen: "When an object
unfolds, its intrinsic dimensions open up, flower, to form a new coordinate system, a new space,
from (a selection of) its (previously) intrinsic dimensions" (144). Marcus Novak is helpful in
relating this phenomenon to hypertext: "Just as hypertext allows any word in a normal text to
explode into volumes of other words, so a hypergraph allows any point in a graph to expand to
include other graphs, nested and linked to any required depth" (230). One helpful way of
visualizing the possibilities described here is to imagine that every point (normally thought of
as having zero dimensions) in a three-dimensional space has the capacity of being a multi-
dimensional object; every point, that is, can be considered a cube.

30"Even as we strive for higher dimensionalities or supernormal capabilities for the denizens
of cyberspace, ordinary space and time must form the basis, the norm, any departures from
which we must justify. Neither an advanced degree in math nor extraordinary powers of
visualization ought to be necessary for a reasonably well-educated person to spend time pro-
ductively in cyberspace" ("Cyberspace" 128).

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Marcus Novak, on the other hand, wants to celebrate the possibilities

inherent in this new technology, as one can sense from the following passage

of exuberant prose:

Cyberspace is a habitat of the imagination, a habitat for the
imagination. Cyberspace is the place where conscious dreaming
meets subconscious dreaming, a landscape of rational magic, of
mystical reason, the locus and triumph of poetry over poverty,
of "it-can-be-so" over "it-should-be-so." (226)

Novak calls for the restoration of poetry and poetic thinking to science,
indulging in the poetic as he does so: "Cyberspace is poetry inhabited, and to
navigate through it is to become a leaf on the wind of a dream" (229). While
one might consider Novak's ebullient prose to be the ranting of a techno-
philic Utopian, his desire to take full advantage of the potentials within the
new medium should not be ignored in order to exploit its differences rather
than fight these differences as limitations to be overlooked.

While some disagree about the extent to which the "liquid" archi-
tectures in cyberspace should be fluid, the common denominator among
these theorists is a vision of cyberspace as a space in which information is
stored visually, a space which users will be able to traverse with the purpose
of retrieving information stored there, in whatever fashion it comes to be
stored. The title of Alan Wexelblat's essay in Cyberspace: First Steps, which is
about "Giving Meaning to Places," indicates what is at stake in the building of
cyberspace. One definition begins as follows: "Cyberspace is a completely
spatialized visualization of all information in global information processing
systems . . ." (Novak 225). Envisioning cyberspace as a three-dimensional
visual information space evokes the art of building memory palaces as well as
all that memory performs for an individual and a culture. David Tomas
acknowledges the implications of this vision for the perpetuation of culture
by directly pointing out the mnemonic status of cyberspace:

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Although cyberspace has been popularized by Gibson's books,
it is neither a pure "pop" phenomenon nor a simple technolog-
ical artifact, but rather a powerful, collective, mnemonic tech
nology that promises to have an important, if not revolutionary,
impact on the future compositions of human identities and
cultures. (31-32)

As an anthropologist, Tomas understands the significance of mnemonic tech-
nologies for the definition of self and culture. Cyberspace is a tool of memory,
an electronic extension of our brains, and as such it becomes another storage
medium for personal, familial, cultural, and disciplinary memory. In the
memory storerooms of cyberspace, with its multi-dimensional imagines,
"chambers bloom wherever data gathers and is stored" (Benedikt "Intro" 2).

The mention of chambers here reintroduces the metaphor of the store-
room, or cella, which occurs in discussions of the Art of Memory, and evokes
a medieval aura of monk's cells and palatial meeting-rooms. This evocation
is not accidental: Theorists of electronic rhetoric, whether it be hypertext or
cyberspace architecture, are consciously employing romantic images of
fortresses and castles to describe the experience of "reading" these electronic
texts. For instance, Novak, in extended passages of italics meant to indicate
transition into fantasized depictions of entering into and navigating
cyberspace, speaks of "armor" and "palaces." I quote at length so as to provide
enough of the necessary context to appreciate the allusions:

Using my deck, I enter the cyberspace. At first the world is dark,
but not because of an absence of light, but because I have not
requested an environment yet. I request my default environ-
ment, my personal database. From it I choose my homebase, or
workbase, or playbase. I am in my personal cyberspace, and I am
not yet in contact with others. This is my palace, and it is
fortified (emphasis mine). ... I sense the presence of others. I see
the traces of passage, the flares of trajectories of other searches.
Those who share my interests visit the spaces around me often
enough for me to recognize the signature of their search
sequences, the outlines of their icons. I open channels and
request communication. They blossom into identities that flow

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in liquid metamorphosis. Layers of armor are dropped to reveal
more intimate selves. . . . (emphasis mine, 232-233)

Setting aside consideration of the curious poetry of this passage and its
implications for subject formation in the electronic era, I am interested in the
palace metaphor and how this coincides with the Art of Memory. The
passage evokes allegorical commonplaces similar to those found in Spenser's
The Faerie Queene : the fortified palace and the layers of armor become
allegorical images of the isolated and protected subject within a cyberspace, in
which interaction with others can only occur when the layers of armor are
shed to reveal the inner self. Here, cyberspace as an information space is
literally figured as a memory palace, which one builds to one's own specifica-
tions.

More to my purpose is a similar allegorical evocation of medieval
architectural structures that occurs in Jay David Bolter's writings about
hypertext. One of the creators of Storyspace, Bolter has himself employed the
term "cell" to describe the writing spaces (or "boxes" as I have crudely called
them) of electronic writing.31 In doing so, whether consciously or not, Bolter
recalls the traditions of the Art of Memory, in which the cella is a store-room
for the memory images (Carruthers 35-36). His characterization of hypertext
as a kind of "topography" or "place-writing" also recognizes this spatial aspect
of Storyspace: "It is not the writing of a place, but rather a writing with
places, spatially realized topics" (25). Implicit in this characterization is a
literal return to the traditional rhetorical notion of having "topics" or

31Ong writes of how the Agricolan "place-logic" conceived of loci as boxes: "The annoyance is
vanquished by the conviction that some sort of spatial imagery— loci, topoi, receptacles,
boxes— can serve as a means of controlling the profusion of concepts and /or things" (Ramus 118).
For the invocation of the "cell" in recent discussions about cyberspace, see Novak: "In a neural
net simulation, information ... is encoded implicitly, as weightings on connections between
simple computational cells. Reality is an emergent property of the cell . . ." (237).

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"commonplaces" (loci communes ) to which one can "go" for information

about a subject.32 This tradition was perpetuated during the Early Modern

period through Agricola's "place-logic" and its revisioning in Ramus's

dichotomies; tenuous remnants can even be seen today in rhetoric textbooks

and their "strategies"for development (e.g. definition, classification, division,

example, cause/effect analysis, comparison and contrast, etc.).33 The advent

of electronic writing— whether in hypertext or cyberspace— promises to

return to rhetoric the consciousness of space inherent in the forgotten

etymologies of these central terms.

So, participating in the tradition of the Art of Memory by using the

word "cell" and by recognizing hypertext's topographic aspects, Bolter

compares the Storyspace environment to that of exploring a dungeon or a

magic castle:

Any book can be thought of as a dungeon, a receptacle of
treasures and dangers. A printed book is a dungeon whose walls
are solid. In an electronic book the walls of each cell may give
way to the touch. Hidden passages may transport the reader
across many levels of the structure. (Writing Space Storyspace
document)

His description is significant, especially for a project such as mine, which is
attempting to find in the memory palace tradition a model for storing
information in a hypertext environment. The similarity of Bolter's descrip-
tion of the electronic dungeon to the following description of how to establish
the loci of one's memory palace is striking:

32See Carruthers, p. 34, for expanded discussion of "commonplaces." See also Ong, Ramus, pp.
104-112, 116-121.

33For the sake of comparison, see an exemplary list of loci in Ong, Ramus : "definition, genus,
species, property, whole, parts, conjugates, adjacents, act, subjects, efficient agent, end,
consequences, intended effects, place, time, connections, contingents, name, pronunciation,
compared things, like things, opposites, differences" (122).

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Ricci suggested that there were three main options for such
memory locations. First, they could be drawn from reality — that
is, from buildings that one had been in or from objects that one
had seen with one's own eyes and recalled in one's memory.
Second, they could be totally fictive, products of the imagination
conjured up in any shape or size. Or third, they could be half
real and half fictive, as in the case of a building one knew well
and through the back wall of which one broke an imaginary
door as a shortcut to new spaces, or in the middle of which one
created a mental staircase that would lead up to higher floors
that had not existed before. (Spence 1-2)

Each suggests a magical aspect enabling one to pass through walls and build

new structures. This magical aspect, here only a metaphor for the fluid

nature of electronic space, parallels Novak's depiction of cyberspace as a

"landscape of rational magic" in which one will experience what is only

figured in Bolter's depiction of traversing the hypertext castle. But one thing

is certain: hypertext, as an informational field, can find a home in the

architectural metaphor of the memory palace. As such, it can mimic the

more advanced developments of cyberspace architecture as they are presently

being theorized by adopting the memory palace as a method of organizing

information in what can be perceived as a three-dimensional electronic

writing space.

It remains now to explore why hypertext architects (as we should now

properly call them) have not adopted the obvious architectural metaphor for

guiding composition in hypertext authoring that Bolter hints at with his

dungeon metaphor. I will argue that this is due to the phenomenon of

"residual literacy" and provide examples of how inertia from centuries of

alphabetic literacy and print culture has carried forth book practices into

electronic texts, some of which become allegories of book reading from an

electronic screen. By examining the interfaces of various hypertexts by recent

authors as well as the gateways to other electronic technologies, we can begin

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to see such residual literacy as a limitation upon the storage potential of
electronic media and begin to theorize the alternatives to such a model.

Residual Literacy in Electronic Interface Designs: Allegories of Book Reading

When Plato wrote his philosophical treatises, he represented them as
dialogues, employing the oral form of conveying information that pre-
dominated before chirography as an interface for transmitting his philosophy.
Though the kind of thinking that enabled the dialogues was, in part, facili-
tated by the apparatus of alphabetic literacy that had developed in the
centuries prior to his writing, Plato valorized the face-to-face dialogue as
fundamental to learning and to the discovery of Truth. One might say he
ignored the very medium that gave body to his philosophy.34 On the other
hand, perhaps an inevitable looking backward occurs in the transitional
process of adopting and implementing an emergent technology of commu-
nication. Ong speaks of the centuries that went by after the introduction of
the alphabet before Plato and the Greeks "interiorized" writing (Orality and
Literacy 24). Spenser's use of the memory palace as a way of thinking about
the work that The Faerie Queene was engaged in is another example of this
phenomenon as it occurred at a different transitional moment in the
"technologizing of the word."

During our current moment of transitional shifting from one
dominant technology to another, evidence of a similar dynamic can be found
in some of the early interface designs. I will call this "residual literacy," a

34In Orality and Literacy, Ong writes, "For Plato expresses serious reservations in the
Phaedrus and his Seventh Letter about writing, as a mechanical, inhuman way of processing
knowledge, unresponsive to questions and destructive of memory, although, as we now know, the
philosophical thinking Plato fought for depended entirely on writing" (24).

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phrase I derive from Ong's concept of "residual orality" that, as he writes,
"can be calculated to a degree from the mnemonic load it leaves on the mind,
that is, from the amount of memorization the culture's educational
procedures require" (Orality and Literacy 41). In a parallel way, "residual
literacy" can be detected in the reliance upon book and paper metaphors that
we see in computer interface design. Each is symptomatic of a reluctance to
embrace the full potential of the emergent technology. Each results from a
form of cultural inertia that must be overcome before this full potential can
be tapped. Each indulges a Janus-like stance, looking both forward and
backward at the same time. While at first this process is for the most part an
unconscious (one might say "natural") way of coping with the change,
eventually the shock of the new wears off and the technology is
"interiorized."

One example of such residual literacy occurs in LEXIS/NEXIS, a
commercial online database service which provides legal documents from all
states (LEXIS) as well as the texts of major newspapers and periodicals
(NEXIS). The documents in NEXIS, for example, are grouped into "libraries"
and "files" and include full text sources from newspapers, wire services, and
full transcripts from news shows. The information organized in the "library"
is said to be like a file cabinet drawer in which "files" of information reside.
"Entering" one of the libraries is therefore like opening a drawer full of files.
Files are subgroups of documents in a library; a typical file consists of all of the
available articles in a single publication. The paper metaphor presides in this
interface insofar as it provides an intuitive method for locating information
in the LEXIS/NEXIS database: we are familiar with going to libraries to find
information and with storing documents in files stored in filing cabinets.

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The hypercard stack entitled If Monks Had Macs, by Brian Thomas,
employs a similarly familiar interface with which the user interacts to nav-
igate through the information. The opening screen positions the user as if
s/he were sitting at a desk, looking out of the window of a monastery. Below
one sees the courtyard, a fountain, and the walls of the facing buildings.
Gurgling water pervades the background, with the occasional bird twitter
interrupting this simulated fountain sound. Upon first opening the stack, the
user also hears monks singing Gregorian chants. On the desk is an open book
with an indiscernible image. Next to this is a pad with what appears to be a
quill. On the right of the opening screen (or "card") is the lower left hand part
of a picture which has been cut off. On the left side of the card one sees a
bookend and two books, one with an arrow pointing to the left. Clicking on
this arrow brings the user to the next card, which positions the user in front
of a bookshelf full of books. Thirty-six books (they are numbered on the
spine) rest on two shelves. One through nine are titled, naming the various
stacks that make up If Monks Had Macs. 35 Clicking on any of these opens up
the stack that bears its title.

The premise of the title suggests the task that awaits us during this
process of transition: if monks had macs, they would have translated the
sacred texts into hypertext documents. This is, in effect, what Brian Thomas
has done with Thomas a Kempis's lmitatio Christi, which is the most
developed of the stacks that one can explore: he has served as a "scribe" (or,
more accurately, a typist) who has transcribed this classic into the new

35One interesting feature of If Monks Had Macs is its desire to function as a "mini-home stack"
for other stacks that one might own. The blank books on the shelf (numbered 10 through 36),
that is, can be given names and can be linked to other hypercard documents that a user has on
his or her hard-drive. The library here becomes an organizing trope, a trope that organizes
one's collection of hyper-card stacks.

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medium.36 Thomas's choice of the Imitatio was not random, however; he

points out in his introduction how suitable it is for this medium:

Despite the inner unity of the Imitation, the reader is usually
advised in the introductions to "open the book to any page at
random where he will find much instruction and inspiration,"
or to read the book "slowly, reflectively, in brief portions at a
time," or to repeatedly turn to it as a "source of devotional
thoughts and aphorisms." Thus, these introductions to the
Imitation advise readers that this is a book that need not be
read sequentially. . . . Ted Nelson, originator of the term "hyper-
text," writes in Literary Machines, "By hypertext, I simply mean
non-sequential writing. . . . Computers are not intrinsically
involved with the hypertext concept." The Imitation of Christ
started out as a medieval manuscript with some of the qualities
we now associate with hypertext.

At one point the document even calls for "dedicated men and women" who
will "copy and illuminate" the wisdom of antiquity and Christianity in the
"hyperage."

Much of the material in // Monks Had Macs employs the book as an
interface metaphor. If one clicks on the image of the open book that appears
on the desk in front of the window, the program presents the user with a card
that looks like an open book. To the right of the "book" are icons that repre-
sent the various options available to the user: a "contents" icon (the word
"contents" on what appears to be a platter), a "find" icon (the word "find" in a
circle and on top of an open book icon), an open book icon which appears to
have the pages flipping back and forth (pressing this will randomly select one
of the chapters for the user, as though s/he were flipping through a book), a

36We must not forget that the materiality of the medium into which a text is translated
ultimately affects the meaning and its reception. As Bolter writes, "A text always undergoes
typographical changes as it moves from one writing space to another. The Greek classics, for
example, have moved from the papyrus roll, to codex, and finally the printed book. When we
read a paperback edition in English of Plato's dialogues or Greek tragedy, we are aware of the
translation from ancient Greek to a modern language. But we should also remember that the
original text was without book or scene divisions, paragraphing, indices, punctuation, or even
word division. All these conventions of modern printing are significant organizational
intrusions into the original work" (118).

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"bookmark" icon (an image of an open book with a bookmark marking a
page), a "library" icon (a bookshelf with books on it; pressing this will return
the user to the library interface described above), and finally an "inkstand"
icon (which opens up a stack allowing the user to "write" notes, comments,
responses, etc.)- The common experience that this interface relies upon is that
of sitting in front of one's personal library, pulling a book off of its shelf, and
doing with it whatever one can do with a book: consult the table of contents,
flip through the pages, mark a certain passage with a bookmark, or take notes
on one's pad.37

A second stack within // Monks Had Macs that utilizes a book
metaphor is entitled "Passing Notes," the premise of which is based on an
anecdote that Thomas tells of being a bored student who decides to pass notes
in class while his biology teacher drones on about evolution. The stack
contains about twenty cards the backgrounds of which depict a torn page, as
though a student ripped a page from her textbook and scribbled a note on it to
pass on to a friend. The content of these notes questions the hegemony of
scientific education and asserts its failure to acknowledge the mysteries of
existence. Each card has written text as well as an image that directly relates to
the note, which demonstrates the limitations of this interface: while the
source of these torn pages is ostensibly a student's textbook, their actual
content reflects the concerns of the "student" Brian Thomas. There is no
attempt to maintain the illusion from which the interface originated.

A similar breakdown in the "user illusion" occurs in the interface
metaphor for the stack entitled "Meat and Conversation," which opens with
an open book: on the left a woodcut image of Brother Andrew, on the right

37Clicking on the "inkstand" icon opens up a stack entitled "Journal," which is subtitled "a
companion stack to Imitatio. " The user can also get to this stack by clicking on the image of the
pad with the quill on it on the opening card.

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the title "Meat and Conversation," subtitled "Excerpts from Brother Andrew's
journal." The first couple of "pages" establishes the context for what is to
become a hypertext version of a video game: Brother Andrew is asked to dine
with a Russian monk visiting the monastery; the monk speaks of how his
fellow monks in Russia had to travel to other monasteries in order to borrow
books to study, as they were so scarce. "The journey is often viewed," says the
monk, "as a kind of trial," and he proceeds to speak of how "the devil spins a
dream-bed of lies among those rocks for every monk. ..." Brother Andrew's
journal then tells of how he suddenly finds himself on the path. When the
user pushes the arrow to turn the "page," the book disappears and there
appears on the screen a map indicating Andrew's position. The user is now
within Andrew's hallucination and must make decisions about which
direction to walk in and what actions to perform. The book interface
completely breaks down as the "reader" becomes the player of a game, a
puzzle that requires a solution.

The fashion in which the interface described above breaks down
indicates the limitation of the book metaphor for interface design. A more
recent set of hypercard stacks by John McDaid, entitled Uncle Buddy's
Phantom Funhouse, employs a variety of different interfaces, one of which
depends on a book metaphor.38 But the purpose of this particular stack,
entitled "Fictionary of the Bezoars," is to provide an intertextual parody of
Milorad Pavic's Dictionary of the Khazars, which Robert Coover classifies as
a hypertext novel.39 The author employs the book metaphor to invoke the

38Significant for my purposes is the "home" card of Uncle Buddy's Phantom Playhouse, which
portrays a house with windows bearing the titles of the various stacks one can explore. While
this is only a very simple use of architecture as interface metaphor, it does point to the path
which this dissertation wishes to clear: the conscious use of the memory palace as an
organizational schema for the storing of information in electronic media.

39See Landow, Hypertext, 107.

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Pavic text (the "title page" of the "Fictionary" exactly emulates the title page of
the Dictionary ), and this invocation is meant to suggest the absurdity of the
book metaphor as interface: the book interface constitutes a limitation of
hypertext's potential that is just as problematic as having a book like the
Dictionary of the Khazars in book form. That is, the Dictionary does not
belong in book form just as the book interface does not belong in a hypercard
stack, for the Dictionary is the closest thing to hypertext that one can achieve
in book form. Each entry has key words that lead the reader in different
directions, forcing him or her to make decisions about what order to read the
selections in. Pavic writes, "the reader has no other choice than to begin in
the middle of any given page and forge his own path. . . . Hence, each reader
will put together the book for himself" (13). This kind of reading differs from
the kind of semantic production a reader provides when reading a typical
printed text in that the author invites readers to construct the order in which
the parts of the texts are read. Such is the ideal of hypertext: a multitude of
different pathways through a given textual network which invites (or forces)
the reader to become an active reader making choices and therefore affecting
his or her own reception of the text.

Despite the apparent headway that a stack like Uncle Buddy's Phantom
Funhouse makes, with its parody of the book interface and its gesture toward
an architectural interface, recent theorists of hypertext composition call for an
ethos of composition in print when composing with computers. George
Landow, as one of the major theorists of hypertext to date, provides a set of
compositional guidelines to follow if one is not to upset or disorient the
reader. His feeling is that, because readers are used to reading books, a
medium in which they always feel oriented, they must be catered to by the
hypertext author, and he sees this imperative as creating three problems for

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authors in this medium: "First, what must they do to orient readers and help
them read efficiently and with pleasure? Second, how can they inform those
reading a document where the links in the document lead? Third, how can
they assist readers who have just entered a new document to feel at home
there?" (Landow, "The Rhetoric of Hypermedia" 82). While Landow's rules
may be appropriate to a certain kind of text, one perhaps more informative or
functional, his generalized approach limits many of the possibilities open to
the author as well as the potential for a different kind of reading experience
that only the computer can provide.

Landow's concern is rooted in this phenomenon of residual literacy,
which applies the standards of print literacy to the medium of computeracy.
He expects of the computer what scholars and pedagogues in an age of
logocentrism expect from its primary organ, the book: transparent and direct
communication, educational efficiency, the elimination of confusion. "In
particular, authors should label folders and descriptions of linked blocks with
an eye to clarity and efficiency" (88). Calling for hierarchical overviews and
other such "devices of orientation," Landow praises the use of the desktop
metaphor as an interface which enables the user to navigate without fear of
disorientation. Speaking of his hypertext document The Dickens Web,
Landow writes, "Equally important, the desktop and folder system efficiently
serve to orient the reader by making movement back to documents opened
previously a quick and easy matter" (87).

The desktop metaphor itself, the icon-driven interface perfected and
popularized by Apple Computers, has come under much fire lately, which
suggests that the interim period of residual literacy may be beginning to end.
Benedikt recognizes the desktop as a product of designers who unconsciously
incorporated the way that information has been organized on the page:

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Here is a simple example of the hidden valences of the WM
[window manager] space of a "desktop" GUI [graphical user
interface]: why is the Macintosh trashcan icon — pale and
ashen — positioned at the bottom right of the screen, while the
rainbow-colored apple icon of the Apple system menu —
happy and edenic — is positioned diametrically opposite, at the
top left? Why have almost all GUI designers agreed that the
top of the screen is icon/menu territory? These are vestiges of
the organization of pages, which for thousands of years (even
before there were "pages") have given different value to the
top and bottom, center and margin, left and right. . . . (131)

This critique makes sense coming from a cyberspace architect who wants to
escape the two-dimensional organization of information that has dominated
from the time of antiquity in order to enter an era of three-dimensional
representations in the form of virtual reality. Benedikt's point, similar to one
made above, concerns the conversion, the flattening, of a three-dimensional
representational space into a two-dimensional one.

Theorists of human-computer interface design also critique the desktop
metaphor as manifesting residual literacy, which is said to limit the ways that
information can be stored and retrieved electronically. Alan Kay, for
instance, writes that "the very idea of a paper 'metaphor' should be scruti-
nized mercilessly" (199), and he goes on to attack the desktop metaphor, the
idea of the "folder," and the metaphors in HyperCard, the latter of which are
not "just imitating paper with a vengeance — it is building in a limitation not
imposed by the physical world" (200). Another theorist, Theodor Nelson,
writes of how the interface of a desktop does not act like a real-world desktop
and therefore is not believable or consistent: "We are told to believe that this
is a 'metaphor' for a 'desktop.' But I have never personally seen a desktop
where pointing at a lower piece of paper makes it jump to the top, or where
placing a sheet of paper on top of a file folder causes the folder to gobble it up"
(237). Nelson here perhaps asks too much of metaphor, demanding of the

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desktop metaphor of interface design a transparent reproduction of real-world
experience.

Nelson, in fact, finds fault with the very use of metaphors, pointing to
the false restriction that accompanies their use of having to avoid mixing
metaphors: "the metaphor becomes a dead weight. Once the metaphor is
instituted, every related function has to become a part of it " (237).40 He calls
this debilitating aspect of resorting to metaphor the new "Metaphoric
Ideology" and says that "this 'metaphor' business has gone too far" (236).41
Alan Kay, too, has similar trouble with the use of metaphor, locating the
problem with the term itself: "One of the most compelling snares is the use
of the term metaphor to describe a correspondence between what the users
see on the screen and how they should think about what they are manipu-
lating" (199). His alternative is the phrase "user illusion," which provides
"clear connotations to the stage, theatrics, and magic— all of which give much
stronger hints as to the direction to be followed" (199). For Kay, as for Marcus
Novak, it is the magic that makes this medium special and that therefore
should be augmented. "Magic" might be viewed as another way of stating
what the electronic media have to offer in terms of communicative potential:
the speed of associative linking or "travelling" that print literacy can not
provide.

40One glaring failure that Nelson points to is the trashcan icon in the Macintosh interface.
This allows one to either delete files or to eject one's disk at the end of a session. Once, when
working together on a project with a person who did not know this, 1 dragged the icon of the
disk into the trash to eject it, and she thought that I was deleting the entire disk at one time.
She loudly expressed her fear, which suggests the need for consistency, if only for personal
comfort.

41Thomas D. Erickson's essay, in the same volume, wants on the other hand to understand
metaphor and to recognize its pervasiveness in our language as a means of creating more
consistent interface metaphors. See his essay "Working with Interface Metaphors," 65-73.

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A similar distaste for metaphor occurs in the work of Deleuze and

Guattari.42 Deleuze wants to invent concepts,43 which are actions upon the

world, rather than metaphors, which are representations that polarize

meaning within a vehicle and a tenor. In considering this, Brian Massumi

writes, "The concept has no subject or object other than itself. It is an act.

Nomad thought replaces the closed equation of representation, x=x=not y

(I=I=not you) with an open equation: . . .+y+z+a . . ." (6). The emphasis here

is on motion: the open equation of the concept moves, while the closed

equation of representation, in which the metaphor falls, is a stoppage. The

open equation evokes a "logic of the AND" (A Thousand Plateaus 25), which

establishes a different kind of comparison, "neither a union, nor a

juxtaposition, but the birth of a stammering, the outline of a broken line

which always sets off at right angles . . ." (Deleuze and Parnet 9-10). This

movement is nomadic; it is not merely compared to nomadism as in

metaphor. Writing of Kafka, Deleuze and Guattari speak of his anti-

aestheticism:

"Grasp the world," instead of extracting impressions from it;
work with objects, characters, events, in reality, and not in
impressions. Kill metaphor. Aesthetic impressions, sensa-
tions, or imaginings still exist for themselves in Kafka's first
essays where a certain influence of the Prague school is at work.
But all of Kafka's evolution will consist in effacing them to the
benefit of a sobriety, a hyper-realism, a machinism that no
longer makes use of them. (Kafka 70)

Since they view metaphor as unreal, the creation of concepts is marked by

"sobriety" and "hyper-realism."

42Deleuze and Guattari are attracted to Kafka in part because "Kafka deliberately kills all
metaphor, all symbolism, all signification, no less than all designation" (Kafka 22).

43Deleuze writes that "philosophy is the art of forming, inventing, and fabricating concepts"
("The Conditions of the Question: What is Philosophy?" 471).

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It is not my intention to resolve the debate over the virtues of
metaphor which is found not only in the works of philosophers like Deleuze
and Guattari but also in the speculations of computer interface designers.
This debate among interface designers concerning the problems inherent
within the desktop metaphor and, indeed, in metaphor itself demonstrates
the heightened awareness of these issues that has come about as a result of
recent rapid changes in the communicative capacities of electronic media. My
goal, then, is to offer a theory of hypertext composition which, as I have
suggested, will find its tutor in the writings of Gilles Deleuze. The next
chapter constitutes a beginning exploration of the instructions that one can
find there. The primary concept that I will draw upon will be that of the
rhizome, a surface-phenomenon which manifests the web-like quality of
hypertext linkage. The rhizome will provide the conceptual model for a
multi-linear mode of writing appropriate to hypertext, a three-dimensional
writing that opposes the two-dimensional linearity of the book.

CHAPTER 5
RHIZOGRAPHY: A MANIFESTO FOR HYPERTEXT COMPOSITION

The Rhizome and Hypertext Writing

I have worked to define grammatology as an application of post-
structuralism which explores the feedback loop of technology, institutional
practices, and subject formation. This particular grammatological study has
been specific to the Early Modern period, taking that transitional moment as
analogous to our own. I have tried to demonstrate what can happen in our
moment by carefully considering what happened in the sixteenth century:
Ramus, a pedagogue in the midst of this transition, invented a system of
mnemonics that exploited the two-dimensional writing space of the printed
page, as we might invent a system of mnemonics that will exploit the three-
dimensional writing space of the electronic technologies; Spenser, a writer in
the midst of this transition, employed a trope that realized the monumental
nature of the print apparatus in his minor poems at the same time that he
incorporated the memory palace as an organizational strategy in The Faerie
Queene. Like Spenser, we too can search for a primary trope of computeracy
while inventing a hybrid mnemonics. I have suggested that the memory
palace can be a useful part of such a mnemonics, helping us to conceptualize
hypertext composition as a rhetoric that takes full advantage of its electronic
features, thereby breaking free of the residual literacy that has dominated the
use of these media. The time is ripe for the resurrection of this once defunct
Art of Memory, given the returning emphasis on allegory and the capacity for

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writing with images that the new hypermedia computers are promising.
Current use of computers for writing does not tap its full potential for
communicative efficacy and efficient information storage and retrieval.

It remains to explore the philosophy of Deleuze as a philosophy of the
screen. Within my historical analogy, I am equating Deleuze with Ramus.
The difference, however, is that, while Ramus specifically worked as a
pedagogue, theorizing a new method of mnemonics that released the full
potential of the page, Deleuze is a philosopher whose work does not directly
affect either pedagogy (especially given the degree of difficulty it poses for the
student/scholar) or electronic rhetoric. My role in this chapter will be to build
that bridge between Deleuze's concept of the rhizome and the new insti-
tutional practices of hypertext composition that might emerge in twenty-first
century English departments. Given our knowledge of the transition that
occurred in the sixteenth century, given what we know of the spatial nature
of classical mnemonics and how Ramus adapted previous mnemonic
strategies to the technology of the printed page, this grammatological frame
may allow us to accelerate the current process of transition, such that the
three-dimensional mnemonic prosthesis that hypertext can be is fully
employed as such.

The notion that hypertext manifests the tenets of poststructural
philosophy and deconstruction has almost become a commonplace in recent
commentary on the phenomenon of hypertext. These commentators connect
abstract notions of subjectivity, intertextuality, multivocality and de-centered-
ness to the experience of composing a hypertext with a computer and reading
a hypertext composition from a computer screen.1 Landow suggests that post-
structural philosophy precedes the technology of hypertext in its struggle to

!See Landow, Hypertext Chapter One, for a sustained treatment of these connections.

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break the boundaries of the book; as such, it demonstrates a program similar
to that of hypertext engineers:

This sweeping change has many components, to be sure, but one
theme appears in both writings on hypertext (and the memex)
and in contemporary critical theory — the limitations of print
culture, the culture of the book. Bush and Barthes, Nelson and
Derrida, like all theorists of these perhaps unexpectedly inter-
twined subjects, begin with the desire to enable us to escape the
confinements of print. (Hypertext 28)

In fact, Landow accounts for the difference in tone between these two sets of
theorists as being due to their common vision of textuality as well as their
relationship to the existing technology: the poststructuralists are pessimistic
because of the apparent hopelessness of expressing a multi-linear kind of
writing in linear book form whereas the hypertext theorists are optimistic
because of what the computer makes available to writers as composers of
hypertext documents.

Bolter also points out the parallel that occurs between poststructural
theory and hypertext. He attributes the monumental status that printed
books have taken on since the fifteenth century, the establishment of a
literary canon, and the current ethos of authority to the permanence that
print brings to writing and points to how recent literary theories (like reader-
response theory and deconstruction) are embodied in the experience of
reading a hypertext. Bolter's task becomes that of saying what the theorists
could not say because of their writing prior to the advent of hypertext: "All
that is left to say — what Barthes could not say because he did not know about
computers — is that the paradigm for the work is a finely bound, printed
volume, whereas the paradigm for the Text is a network in a computer's
memory" (161). The sense that one gets from both Bolter and Landow is not
so much that poststructuralism influenced the engineering of hypertext but

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that we are experiencing a generalized paradigm shift of which these are two

aspects.

These commentaries have primarily focused upon Derrida and Barthes

as representatives of poststructural philosophy.2 While much in their

writings is helpful in conceptualizing hypertext as a multi-linear medium, as

Landow and Bolter have worked to point out, I am proposing an extensive

study of the ways in which the poststructural philosophy of Deleuze and

Guattari can also be helpful — perhaps even more so than Derrida and

Barthes — in thinking about hypertext composition. Others have gestured

toward such a study. Gregory Ulmer, for instance, in his work inventing a

genre for videography, writes of the value of the rhizome:

They give us, that is, an image of wide scope that helps us to
experience the quality of a new memory, ordered in a paleo-
logical way, as well as to begin to imagine how to remotivate
the tradition of mnemotechnics to the needs of electronic
cognition. . . . What the tree diagram was to the book, the
rhizome map is to electronics. . . . (140-141)

Craig Saper also recognizes the value of exploring Deleuze and Guattari for
theoretical guidance on how to write electronically. His essay "Electronic
Media Studies: From Video Art to Artificial Invention" attempts to explain
as well as demonstrate this by providing a "guided tour" through a
hypothetical hypertext which, as he says, "must, nevertheless, only hint at the
electronic version" (123). Saper conceives of A Thousand Plateaus as itself
being like a hypertext document: "I would argue that Deleuze and Guattari
have written a theory about electronic learning which addresses the
ideological concerns of media theory; their model of writing resembles a CD-
ROM disk or hypermedia program" (122).

^Terence Harpold's Lacanian "reading" of hypertext, which offers a "psychoanalytic theory of
narrative digression in hypertexts" (172), is one notable exception to this generalization.

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To recognize fully the role that the philosophy of Deleuze and Guattari
can play in theorizing an electronic rhetoric, I propose to call one possible
genre that can be based on their work "rhizography," which suggests that
hypertext writing is like their notion of the rhizome, and I will work in this
chapter to demonstrate this equation. My comments will be specific to one
particular hypertext writing program called Storyspace, of which Jay David
Bolter is one of the co-creators. While this may limit the range of this
chapter's application as instructions for hypertext writing, the Storyspace
medium has the virtue of being "user-friendly" and of having achieved a
degree of popularity (probably for this very reason). Conversion software
exists for converting a storyspace document into HyperCard, and a recent
posting to the Technoculture discussion list on the Internet tells of a program
that will convert Storyspace documents into "MOO" architecture, a form of
Internet communication.3 Prominent authors like Robert Coover are singing
its praises and even beginning to author hypertext documents in it. For these
reasons, Storyspace will at least be competitive with other hypertext formats
such as HyperCard and Intermedia and will therefore be a force to be reckoned
with.

If it is true that hypertext "creates an almost embarrassingly literal
embodiment" of Derridean and Barthesian poststructural tenets, as Landow

3David Blair, author of this posting of April 6th, 1994, writes of his project titled "Waxweb,"
which "is a large constructive hypertext (with hypertext extensions coming later) which has

been converted to MOO-space at Hotel MOO 'Waxweb' formally began as a hypertext

groupware project, in which 25 net-connected people around the world would use the groupware
functionality of Eastgate's Storyspace hypertext software to add counter-writings, counter-
structures, imaginary backstory or characters, or simpler things, onto a hypertext 'baselayer'

which I constructed Not long after the above project began, Tom Meyer, a grad student in

computer science at Brown, decided to open the hypertext-based Hotel MOO, which
incorporated an extension he had written that allowed the conversion of 'Storyspace'

hypertext files into coherent MOO-architecture " For a recent article on MOO spaces, see

David Bennahum's article entitled "Fly Me to the MOO: Adventures in Textual Reality,"
Lingua Franca 4.4 (June 1994): 22-36.

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writes {Hypertext 34), the same might be said about the rhizomatic network

that Storyspace creates. A rhizome is characterized by shoots and runners; its

shallow roots do not achieve the degree of depth that a tree does, but, as a

result, it runs along the surface of the earth, covering much ground. In the

same manner, the opening screen of a hypertext document might have four,

five, or more different directions that a reader can choose. Rather than

developing in a single, progressive manner, as in a linear book, a hypertext

can scatter as it shoots off runners going in many different directions. This

multiplicity is very much in the Deleuzoguattarian spirit of the rhizome, as

the following passage will demonstrate:

We will enter, then, by any point whatsoever; none matters
more than another, and no entrance is more privileged even if
it seems an impasse, a tight passage, a siphon. We will be trying
only to discover what other points our entrance connects to,
what crossroads and galleries one passes through to link two
points, what the map of the rhizome is and how the map is
modified if one enters by another point. (Kafka 3)

This latter notion of affecting the "map" depending upon a particular entry

point parallels the talk among hypertext theorists of the interactive nature of

hypertext reading, how the reader co-authors the text, in a sense, via the

decisions she makes while reading.4 One has no choice but to do these tasks,

for one enters a hypertext in the same way that one enters a rhizome. From

that point on, a reader will discover "what other points" or nodes along the

path are connected to an entrance into the text.

The connectivity of a rhizome also comes very close to the linking

potentials in hypertext: "unlike trees or their roots, the rhizome connects any

point to any point" (A Thousand Plateaus 21). Hypertext, like the rhizome,

4See, for instance, Bolter's discussion of the hypertext-style novel Composition No. \, which is
a sheaf of unnumbered, unbound, individual "pages" that comes in a box and can be shuffled
around, and Michael Joyce's renowned hypertext "Afternoon" (written in Storyspace): "In both
fictions, the burden of constructing the text is thrown back, on the reader" (142).

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has the potential of linking every node to every other node in its textual
network. This, in fact, is the virtue of reading a (hyper)text from a computer
screen: it provides ways of moving through the information stored within it
that differ from book browsing. It might be said that hypertext internalizes an
index and contents system that has a specific locus in a book, so that, rather
than turning to the back of the book to locate the next page reference that
appears under a given entry, a hypertext can provide immediate access to the
passage with the keyword in it merely by selecting that keyword.

This elimination of steps in a process, this manifestation of a newly
acquired speed, should not be underestimated: though the computer may
only allow us to do what we already do a lot faster, it is the speed itself that
will contribute to changing the way scholars read, write, and do research.
Once the majority of scholarly information is available on-line via the
Internet, the speed of accessing "books" and "articles" will increase tenfold.
As an example of this process, imagine a scholar reading a book in her office.
She discovers a footnote that she wants to trace, so she takes down the
bibliographic information, physically goes to the library, finds the call
number, searches for the item (which may or may not be there), and then
leaves. Within a hypertext environment such as the World-Wide Web
promises to provide, this scholar could have merely selected the footnote
itself to access the article in question; the time spent retrieving it from the
library collapses in that moment of access, and the associational path that her
research takes because of this immediate access may differ from the one that
would emerge later in the delays that physical transit cause.

Some recent texts consciously try to emulate this process. J. Hillis
Miller's recent book, Illustration, is one example: while it tries to embody a
hypertext format, "illustrating" an electronic rhetoric, it can only fail to do so

185

because of its book status. In her review of his book, Rosalind Krauss writes
the following:

J. Hillis Miller takes his leave of the reader of this nonbook with
the insouciant thought that if this conglomeration of fragments
and set-pieces has not added up to a "continuous argument" this
is because it is, in its very formlessness, anticipating the brave
new world of "large digitized databases." It is not for him to
build a discursive structure that will unfold between the covers
of a book; instead, he writes, "One can imagine a computerized
version of my essay in which each section would have a 'button'
leading out to the large context of which my citations are a part
and in which a much larger set of illustrations (in the sense of
both pictures and texts) would be available through computer
links." (133)

One must "imagine" a computerized version of the essay, which of course

can only fall short of the actual experience of reading the essay from a

computer screen. Miller's book retains the linear format of the book; other

more experimental texts such as Saper's essay mentioned above and Ulmer's

"Grammatology (in the Stacks) of Hypermedia, a Simulation: or, when does a

pile become a heap?" emulate the composition in fragments in which a

hypertext writer must engage. Each prepares a sequence of "screens" or

"cards" that represent one line or path through a larger hypertext document.

While this evocation of a single path among other paths comes closer to the

actual experience of hypertext reading, it does not allow for the experience of

wandering from the main path — and even getting lost — that reading from

the computer screen allows. Such wandering can provide an experience of

discovery similar to that often associated with browsing at the library: one

might stumble across some interesting or useful information that one did not

intend to seek. This form of browsing, however, differs from electronic

wandering in that some links and associations have already been provided by

previous travellers who have forged a path through the information, and

other links can be made by the one who is travelling.

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So the question that this chapter asks, to state it once more, is this: how
can the philosophy of Deleuze and Guattari help to theorize composition in
hypertext, specifically in Storyspace? I have suggested that Storyspace literally
embodies the rhizome as much as this is possible, and others have pointed
out this connection as well. But the rhizome is part of a complicated network
of philosophical concepts that form and inform it; to explore a rhizomatic
style of hypertext composition therefore will be to demonstrate the
connections between their notion of the rhizome and Storyspace as a
medium of information storage and retrieval in which one writes (or, more
accurately, types). In doing so, I will discuss conception and method together,
as they feed off of each other in a fashion that directly manifests one goal of
Deleuze and Guattari's writings.5

A Deleuzoguattarian Conception and Method of Hypertext Composition

The first characteristic of this electronic rhetoric is speed. The speed

that hypertext brings to composition and reading has already been

acknowledged by hypertext commentators. As George Landow writes,

The speed with which one can move between passages and
points in sets of texts changes both the way we read and the way
we write, just as the high-speed number crunching computing
changes various scientific fields by making possible investiga-
tions that before had required too much time or risk.
(Hypertext 61)

5In Brian Massumi's reading of their work, "meaning is force" (as the first chapter of A User's
Guide is entitled). Concepts have a material effect in the world and are not merely of the
ethereal realm of the "mind." "Interpretation is force, and an application of force is the
outcome of an endless interplay of processes natural and historical, individual and
institutional. This gives us a second approximation of what meaning is: more a meeting
between forces than simply the forces behind the signs. Force against force, action upon action,
the development of an envelopment: meaning is the encounter of lines of force, each of which is
actually a complex of other forces" (11). The goal of their work, then, is to invent concepts
which exert some force in the real world.

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If we take Landow's word for it, then both reading of and composition in
hypertext should be fast, as fast as it lets readers read and writers compose,
because it will generate new and different kinds of "investigations."

One line of investigation might be to explore how this characteristic of
speed changes the kind of composition that is produced. In the age of
alphabetic literacy, texts were most likely composed by hand. Walter Ong
recognizes how the chirographic process affected the product of composition:
"The very reflectiveness of writing — enforced by the slowness of the writing
process as compared to oral delivery as well as by the isolation of the writer as
compared to the oral performer — encourages growth of consciousness out of
the unconscious" {Orality and Literacy 150).6 Ong suggests here that the
material conditions of writing— i.e. using a writing utensil to compose a text
on parchment or paper — helped to generate the textual norms of the present
as they are manifest in the genres of high literacy (the essay and the novel),
norms of depth and development which emerge from standards derived
from slowness. On the other hand, the speed of typing on a computer
wordprocessor, which allows some to type upward of 100 words per minute,
allows one to compose much faster than a person could write.

One could see how the new conditions of composition that word-
processing creates could affect the resultant composition. Judged from the
point of view of literate standards, however, "fast" compositions would fall

6Despite Carruthers's problems with Ong, she writes of Quintilian's comments on writing as a
hindrance in passages which agree with Ong on this point: "Quintilian stresses one matter in
regard to the layout of the waxed tablets. Waxed tablets best serve excision and correction
(though people with poor eyes may have to use parchment in order to see the letters better —
parchment slows down the writing process, however, and so may hinder thought)" (204). The
slowness is necessary for achieving the degree of depth that alphabetic literacy makes
possible: "Writing is crucial because it forces us to concentrate and its slowness makes us careful:
'as deep ploughing makes the soil more fertile ... so, if we improve our minds by something
more than superficial study, we shall produce a richer growth of knowledge and shall retain it
with greater accuracy'" (204). These references to depth and superficiality should resonate
with my earlier discussion of these issues.

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short of standards derived from centuries of chirographic practice and applied
to "slow" compositions. Such judgment is reminiscent of the residual
literacy previously examined in chapter four, and we also see this inertia
manifest in institutional norms of tenure tracking, which demands that the
work of young professors achieves some degree of monumental success — that
is, that their work as professors becomes acknowledged by the academy as
achieving "weight" or "gravity." The ideology of the heavy, the grave,
corresponds to the monumental status that print achieves for thought: the
technology of print brought with it the weight of the gravestone, the effect of
thought etched into stone, into a monument, unchangeable, wrought
forever. Here, I evoke the sense of monumentality both as something that
endures, something that marks an achievement, and as something that is
heavy, something that marks a grave/gravity.

This figure of the monument draws a connection between weight and
gravity in a metaphorical sense: an argument has "weight" if it achieves a
degree of "gravity" or seriousness that must be acknowledged by other
authorities. One can achieve such seriousness only by arriving at a certain
depth of analysis that is determined by editorial boards of older, more estab-
lished professors. Receiving a Ph.D. simulates this process: the candidate
writes a practice book, which must meet the standards of a committee of
authorities. But the process of publishing itself secures tenure insofar as it
signifies an institutional rite of passage by writing a text that becomes fixed in
print. The book becomes a marker similar to a gravestone in its monumental
status, for it marks an unchanging permanence. As Ong writes, "Print is
comfortable only with finality" (Orality and Literacy 132). And what is more
final than the "grave"?

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Deleuze and Guattari oppose this tradition of gravity and weight that

constitutes the apparatus of print literacy, instead espousing the opposing

virtues of lightness and speed. As Kristin Ross writes of their philosophy of

action libre, "'Absolute' speed and the way in which parts of the body escape

from gravitational pull in order to occupy a nonstratified, nonpunctual space

characterize 'free action'" (68). Gravity here signifies a force of tradition, a

force of stasis, that which denies experimentation by perpetuating a particular

world-view. They draw their example for this force of cultural inertia that

exists within even science from physics itself:

Universal attraction became the law of all laws, in that it set the
rule for the biunivocal correspondence between two bodies; and
each time science discovered a new field, it sought to formalize it
in the same mode as the field of gravity. Even chemistry became
a royal science only by virtue of a whole theoretical elaboration
of the notion of weight. (A Thousand Plateaus 370)

Gravity here is said to provide the terminology by which new sciences

defined themselves. Speed, then, does not necessarily signify actual motion

but represents the concept of freeing oneself, as much as this is possible, from

institutional restraints and the inertial forces of a culture that are imposed

upon its individuals. In terms of hypertext composition, it just so happens to

be the potential speed of composition that allows one to "pick up speed" in

this figurative sense in order to free oneself from the gravitational forces of

residual literacy.

To present their position in another way, the opposition to gravity is

an opposition to what they call "arborescent thinking," which is the binaristic

form of logic that they oppose to the rhizome. Arborescence is the realm of

print literacy, which always manifests a unity, and it is to this unity that the

poststructural thrust of Deleuze and Guattari's work is addressed. They write

of three different kinds of books:

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A first type of book is the root-book. The tree is already the
image of the world, or the root the image of the world-tree.
This is the classical book. . . . One becomes two: whenever we
encounter this formula . . . what we have before us is the most
classical and well reflected, oldest, and weariest kind of thought.
(5)

The "root-book" represents arborescence in its purest form: binary logic, the

"weariest" kind of thinking from which their work tries to free us.7 The

second kind of book, the "radicle system," appears to undermine the unity of

the root-book but ultimately reasserts a higher unity:

This is as much to say that the fascicular system does not really
break with dualism, with the complementarity between a subject
and an object, a natural reality and a spiritual reality: unity is
consistently thwarted and obstructed in the object, while a new
type of unity triumphs in the subject. (6)

These two forms of arborescence are elsewhere connected to the force of
gravity, which implicates the concept of arborescence as a form of institu-
tional stasis: "In short, it seems that the force of gravity lies at the basis of a
laminar, striated, homogeneous, and centered space; it forms the foundation
for those multiplicities termed metric, or arborescent, whose dimensions are
independent and are expressed with the aid of units and points (movements
from one point to another)" (370). If gravity is in the realm of arborescence,
then speed is in the realm of the rhizome, the third form of "book."8

7The desire to escape the dichotomous thinking of binaristic logic is a commonplace of
poststructural thought. See for example Barthes, A Lover's Discourse, in which he writes of
"the glorious end of logical thinking" (21) and of how he "seeks a new unheard-of consciousness
beyond dichotomies" (61). See also Derrida, "White Mythology," in which he writes that the
"logic of the abyme is the figurative ruination of logic" (262).

8Gregory Ulmer, in Teletheory, draws upon these terms to characterize his genre for
videography that he calls "mystory." He opposes "models" to "relays": models are
problematic in that they inspire only imitation and not invention, not experimentation. As he
writes, "The problem is that nomadic texts such as those authored by Artaud or Kleist
themselves end up becoming monuments, 'inspiring a copy to be modeled.' This alternative —
the relay, organized by speed, rather than the gravity of a monument— will be one of the most
difficult and important issues for teletheory . . ." (170). Insofar as rhizography emphasizes
speed, it is similar to this aspect of Ulmer's "mystory."

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This connection between speed and the rhizome becomes clearer
when, in the process of defining the concept of the rhizome, Deleuze and
Guattari invoke simple geometry in characterizing the notions of
arborescence and gravity as being similar to the mathematical exercise of
plotting points. In their plateau entitled "The Smooth and the Striated," they
write, "Of course, there are points, lines, and surfaces in striated space as well
as in smooth space. ... In striated space, lines or trajectories tend to be
subordinated to points: one goes from one point to another. In the smooth,
it is the opposite: the points are subordinated to the trajectory" (478). The
plotting of points, of localizable loci, then, is antithetical to the rhizome:
"Make rhizomes, not roots, never plant! Don't sow, grow offshoots! Don't be
one or multiple, be multiplicities! Run lines, never plot a point! Speed turns
the point into a line!" (24). Speed here becomes instrumental in converting
the striated into the smooth, the heavy into the weightless, the point into a
line. The progression of exclamations suggests that the rhizomatic gesture is
one of speed, and the geometric description suggests that speed creates a
dimension: if a point, which is zero dimensions, becomes a line when it is
speeded up, a line being one dimension, then it is the speed itself that acts as a
dimensional generative, that creates a dimension where one never before
existed.

It is in this "space" of dimensional generation that Deleuze and
Guattari create the tensions that promote rhizomatic thinking. Indeed,
"between" dimensions is where speed occurs: "The middle is by no means
average; on the contrary, it is where things pick up speed" (25). This
statement develops their theory of the between, the middle space between
dimensions, for it is there that points are not localizable: "Between things
does not designate a localizable relation going from one thing to the other

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and back again, but a perpendicular direction, a transversal movement that
sweeps one and the other away, a stream without beginning or end that
undermines its banks and picks up speed in the middle" (25). This fascina-
tion with the between or the middle explains their fascination with fractals, as
fractals are fractional dimensions, dimensions that exist between the typical
one, two, or three-dimensional objects that we are most familiar with in
Euclidean geometry:

Is it possible to give a very general mathematical definition of
smooth spaces? Benoit Mandelbrot's "fractals" seem to be on the
path. Fractals are aggregates whose number of dimensions is
fractional rather than whole, or else whole but with continuous
variation in direction. An example would be a line segment
whose central third is replaced by the angle of an equilateral
triangle. . . . [S]uch a segment would constitute an infinite line or
curve with a dimension greater than one, but less than a
surface (=2). (486)

They continually refer to mathematics in defining their key philosophical

concepts, as in this definition of "multiplicity":

In a multiplicity what counts are not the terms or the elements,
but what there is "between", the between, a set of relations
which are not separable from each other. Every multiplicity
grows from the middle, like the blade of grass or the rhizome.
We constantly oppose the rhizome to the tree, like two concep-
tions and even two very different ways of thinking. A line does
not go from one point to another, but passes between points,
ceaselessly bifurcating and diverging, like one of Pollock's lines.9
(Dialogues viii)

This abstract sense of betweenness that appears so central to their

thinking relates to hypertext composition in that, when one is composing in

Storyspace, there is a sense that the job is never finished — one is always "in

9The notion of the space between is also significant and recurs in definitions of other key
concepts, such as the following clarification of "becomings": "We said the same thing about
becomings: it is not one term which becomes the other, but each encounters the other, a single
becoming which is not common to the two, since they have nothing to do with one another, but
which is between the two, which has its own direction, a bloc of becoming, an a-parallel
evolution" (Dialogues 6-7).

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the middle," so to speak, as always another potential line of development (or

"line of flight" as Deleuze and Guattari are fond of calling it) offers itself, or a

link between two nodes that went unrecognized presents itself. Thus,

hypertext composition in Storyspace manifests this rhizomatic action of

"transversal movement," this perpendicular off-shooting that resembles a

living rhizome. It allows the composer, upon thinking of something only

tangentially connected to the "line" of reasoning being developed at whatever

point in a composition, immediately to realize its presence, to make it real, by

making a textbox, establishing the link that generated the tangent in the first

place, and then— depending on the composer's desire— either developing the

new line or returning to the "main" or initial line of reasoning. Whichever

way the composer, the rhizographer, chooses to go, both paths are in

(computer) memory. There is a smaller chance of forgetting that new idea,

that potential pathway. This notion of having "lines" of thinking employs

the terms of the rhizome that Deleuze and Guattari offer: rather than making

a "point," a rhizographer would make a "line."

This leads to the second characteristic of electronic rhetoric, which

suggests that the mind should be allowed to wander as much as possible

during composition, taking advantage of the speed with which Storyspace

allows one to compose in order to map the mind in action. This precept

assumes that Storyspace is somehow particularly amenable to representing

mental activity. This is so because it is, as I am arguing, a hypertext program

that embodies many characteristics of the Deleuzoguattarian concept of the

rhizome, and the mind, from their point of view, is structured like a

rhizome:

Thought is not arborescent, and the brain is not rooted or
ramified matter. What are wrongly called "dendrites" do not
assure the connection of neurons in a continuous fabric. The

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discontinuity between cells, the role of the axons, the function-
ing of the synapses, the existence of synaptic microfissures, the
leap each message makes across these fissures, make the brain a
multiplicity immersed in its plane of consistency or neurologia,
a whole uncertain, probabalistic system ("the uncertain nervous
system"). Many people have a tree growing in their heads, but
the brain itself is much more a grass than a tree. (15)

The recent work building neural networks and connectionist models of

the mind also supports this rhizomatic conception of the mind. Theorists of

cognitive psychology write of how the mind works like a network,10 while

artificial intelligence (AI) researchers have realized that conceiving of the

mind as a computer, which works serially (logically), does not approach the

way the mind really works.11 A misconception of AI research posits that a

piece of information has a single, identifiable address in the mind,12 whereas

connectionist theory allows for two or more memories to reside in the same

place and also that the same memory may reside in several places at once:

Not only is an item of knowledge smeared out across an
expanse of network instead of being at one pinpoint location;
it is also superimposed on other items, so that any given place

10Jeremy Campbell, writing of these matters, says, "Papert and his colleague Marvin Minsky
see the brain as a network of networks . . ." (215). Minsky, in his book The Society of Mind, tells
how the structure of his book emulates the mind itself: "One trouble is that these ideas have

lots of cross-connections. My explanations rarely go in neat, straight lines from start to end

Instead they're tied in tangled webs. Perhaps this fault is actually mine, for failing to find a
tidy base of neatly ordered principles. But I'm inclined to lay the blame upon the nature of the
mind: much of its power seems to stem from just the messy ways its agents cross-connect" (17).

^Campbell writes, "Throwing out the metaphor of the serial computer and replacing it with
the metaphor of a brain which is not a logic machine but a knowledge medium . . . leads to a
considerably more expansive and generous view of the mind" (16).

12George Johnson, in In the Palaces of Memory, writes, "Inspired by artificial intelligence,
many psychologists were seized by the idea that the churnings of the mind could be thought of
as algorithms, step-by-step procedures that could be embodied in computer programs. But when
eyed too closely, the metaphor became strained. In a computer, memory and processing are
completely separate functions— different boxes on the architectural plans. Every parcel of
information is assigned an address and stored in an array of memory chips or on a magnetic disk.
When the central processor needs the information, it must be summoned from its numbered cell.
The computer has to know where the memory is stored in order to retrieve it" (163-164).

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in the network thousands of different memories may reside,
one on top of the other. (Campbell 157)

The multi-layered connections and networks of memories stored in the brain

help to explain how the mind is nomadic by nature, how it encourages

wandering.13

The debate between AI researchers and theorists of neural networks
concerning where and how memories are stored parallels Deleuze and
Guattari's dichotomy of the arborescent vs. the rhizome. Recall that the
arborescent privileges the point over the line; it plots locatable points that are
places of stoppage. The rhizome, on the other hand, privileges the line over
the point, or the point in motion (which constitutes a line); it is constantly
trying to avoid stopping at any given point by remaining in motion and
attaining speed. Its desire to be between represents a desire to avoid being
"weighted down" by gravity at any one place. In this way the concept of
nomadism overlaps with the concept of rhizomatics insofar as each
encourages a wandering from fixed points of habitation as well as from
habitual thinking.

The nomadic concept of the rhizome forces us to reconceive our use of
classical rhetorical training in terms of this poststructural abhorrence of the
localizable point.14 The memory palace tradition, as I have written in

13Deleuze and Guattari recognize the epic quality of thought when, in one passage treating
nomadism, they write that "To think is to voyage" (482).

14This emphasis on the "nonlocalizable loci " has become common among poststructural
thinkers. The notion of the nonlocalizable recurs in Deleuze's The Fold, which finds in
Leibniz's baroque philosophy much that connects to his own thinking. Writing of the motion of
the fold at one point, Deleuze says, "It is an extremely sinuous fold, a zigzag, a primal tie that
cannot be located" (120; see also pp. 103 and 111 for references to the nonlocalizable). Derrida's
conception of the crypt also participates in this trend. According to J. Hillis Miller, "The chief
obstacle to a complete cartography of Derrida's topographies, however, is not the extent and
complexity of the terrain but the presence within any place on his map ... of a place that
cannot be mapped. This place resists toponymy, topology, and topography, all three.
Somewhere and nowhere in every Derridean topography is a secret place, a crypt whose
coordinates cannot be plotted" ("Derrida's Topographies" 6).

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previous chapters, instructs us to have specific places in which images are
stored. This is a topographic gesture, a desire to map out knowledge in the
same way that AI researchers wanted a single address for each item of
information stored in a computer, and as such it is a manifestation of
logocentrism, according to J. Hillis Miller: "Topography is a logocentric
practice through and through. It depends, for example, on the law of
noncontradition. A place is either there in a given place or not there, and no
thing, a building for example, can be in more than one place at once"
("Derrida's Topographies" 12). But memory, as we have seen, is not logo-
centric in this sense; memory places can overlap, can be in more than one
place at once.

So, while the memory palace is a mnemonic tool that helps us to
remember, it may not work the way the mind does when it remembers. In
terms of hypertext composition, the traditional process of building a memory
palace — with fixed places and localizable loci — can help to organize the
architecture of a Storyspace environment, but we do not want it to foreclose
the anti-logocentric possibilities of wandering, of being between places. This
is the subject matter of Craig Saper's Tourism and Invention: Roland
Barthes's Empire of Signs. Barthes's book is about getting lost as a tourist in
Japan. According to Saper, Barthes is playing with the idea of the
"commonplaces" as topoi for orienting a speaker/writer within the treasure-
house of memory. If one is properly trained as a rhetorician, one will never
get lost, for speaking and writing effectively becomes a matter of going to the
memory loci and retrieving information. Saper writes that Barthes's book is
a set of instructions for getting lost; he suggests that the losing of one's way
ultimately can be an inventive process.

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Knowing where every item of information is within a memory-palace

or a database denies one the pleasures of getting lost, the pleasures of

discovering some knowledge that one had not intended to discover. While

some would find such an efficiently mapped topography to be an advantage,

others, like Michel de Certeau, find it problematic:

Both contemporary scientific analyses that reduce memory to its
"social frameworks" and the clerical techniques that in the
Middle Ages so cleverly transformed it into a composition of
places and thus prepared the modern mutation of time into a
quantifiable and regulatable space, forget or reject its detours. . . .
In this way, surprises are averted. (89)

De Certeau is calling here for an embrace of memory's detours, its nomadic

wanderings that lead one away from the quantified and regulated spaces of a

topography, away from the plotted points of arborescence.

This emphasis on getting lost, on travelling like a nomad between

established points, is very much part of the anti-Cartesian tendency in

poststructural thought. Descartes is, after all, the one who codified the link

between algebra and Euclidean geometry, the one who invented the mapping

of points in the first place.15 Georges Van Den Abbeele is very helpful in

identifying the use of travel as metaphor in Descartes's philosophy and

deconstructing the grounds upon which the philosopher bases his system of

thought. Insofar as Descartes perpetuates the logocentrism that he inherited

from ancient Greece, Van Den Abbeele's work participates in the general

poststructural project of overturning the reign of the arborescent and its

privileging of unity. In Travel as Metaphor, Van Den Abbeele writes of

Descartes's negotiation of the semantic void by means of a mixed metaphor.

15"Descartes had both 'algebraized' geometry and 'geometrized' algebra. (And it is this second
movement that is of most interest to us here.) With one profound invention, he had built the
conceptual bridge we today call the Cartesian coordinate system" (Benedikt, "Introduction"
20).

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According to Van Den Abbeele, in his Second Meditation Descartes first
describes being thrust into a disorientation that is like an abyss of water out of
which one is unable to swim. But suddenly a ground appears upon which he
can climb out of the abyss. Van Den Abbeele comments that the very fact of
having a certain destination is what provides this grounding:

In other words, the very act of positing certainty as a destination
already puts the philosopher on firm ground and keeps him
from slipping into the drift of aimless nomadism. To say where
one is going is to orient one's position in relation to that destina-
tion, to define one's position as a position in relation to that
destination, toward which one can proceed teleologically. (43)

With Descartes's position, any deviation is already taken into consideration:
"No notion, in sum, is more circumscribed than the notion of transgres-
sion. . . . The very metaphor of wandering precludes wandering . . ." (47). The
cogito becomes a point of origin, an anchoring point, "certain and
unshakable," from which any wandering can occur and to which any such
wandering will return. "What is projected is a circular journey, a wandering
that is not at all aimless but in fact always already circumscribed, such that it
must inevitably return to the point of departure" (45).

An anti-Cartesian perspective such as poststructuralism fosters would
therefore encourage an aimless wandering with no return, a perpetual
nomadism.16 One engaged in a rhizographic writing style embracing this
dictum would never try to make a "point"; rather, one should let the mind
wander and record that wandering as quickly as possible with the speed of a
Storyspace program. Such speed should encourage the automatic style of
writing that surrealists attempted but would avoid the senseless quality of its

16This follows Ulmer's strategy in Heuretics, in which he revises Descartes's discourse,
deriving an anti-method, by contrasting all of Descartes's points, since "so many theorists of the
contemporary paradigm have declared themselves to be Anti-Cartesians" (12). One of the
instructions in ANTl-(BOOK)THREE provides the following moral rule: "wander aimlessly
(vagabondage)" (13).

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results, the goal being to map the mind in its rhizomatic branching in a
medium that mirrors its structure. The problem with Surrealistic automatic
writing lay with the medium which they were using: while typing enabled
them to approach the speed of the keyboard, their writing could only go in
one direction because of the linearity of the page. The Storyspace program, on
the other hand, combines speed with a rhizomatic medium.

A scholarly essay on Spenser written in Storyspace, for instance, would
not seek to be completely objective, to obliterate the subject who is writing it,
but would develop any associational lines of thinking that presented
themselves, because the Storyspace hypertext program encourages their
pursuit. Reference to the writer's experience with comic-book heroes,
dungeons and dragons, video games or popular fantasy movies all would
become viable subject matter in various rhizomatic offshoots branching from
an essay on The Faerie Queene, for instance. Personal experiences that
perhaps relate only allegorically would also become included, as well as
fictional storylines that might masquerade as real experience. The injunction
to wander nomadically, that is, would encourage interdisciplinary, multi-
generic compositions and could open up to include other people's comments,
essays, short stories, poems, whatever. A rhizography may be by many people
or it may be by only one, but either way it will reveal the dialogic character of
the mind as the various voices are set free from the gravity of a single,
unified self.

This leads to the third and final characteristic of electronic rhetoric that
I will treat here, that of density. The kind of text described above has the
quality of a patchwork quilt or, perhaps more accurately, an aggregate of
loosely connected nodes that are networked via hypertext links. These links
may be determined only by very superficial associations, hence its rhizomatic,

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surface-oriented status. I have previously discussed the prevalence of an
ideology of depth which is privileged in the apparatus of print literacy and
argued that a resurgence of the surface is presently working to undermine
this hegemony of depth. Rhizography, then, helps to deconstruct the
metaphorical concept of depth and substitutes the concept of superficiality.
The rhizome grows on the surface and covers much ground, whereas the tree
achieves great depth but does not spread out along the surface to the extent
that a rhizome does. Such is the advantage of the multi-linear format of
electronic composition in hypertext as opposed to the oftentimes linear
format of literate composition. Because a rhizography can only be composed
in an electronic hypertext program, the rhizographer can create a true "text"
in the etymological sense of the word: a woven network of connections that
resembles the way rhizomes like watermelons or crabgrass grow.

But even these metaphors, rhizomatic though they are, do not
adequately describe the structure that the Storyspace hypertext will take, for
they are two-dimensional, describing the surface of a plane, whereas Story-
space (among other hypertext programs) enables the composer to visualize a
three-dimensional entity. I have discussed in chapter four how the spatializa-
tion of knowledge in hypertext takes an important leap from two-dimen-
sional representations on the page to three-dimensional representations in
cyberspace (hypertext being a primitive form of cyberspace). The model of the
rhizome need not be abandoned, however; it merely needs adaptation to the
third-dimension. Deleuze and Guattari provide this adaptation with their
concepts of the molar and the molecular.

Extracting the connections among their concepts is not always easy,
though. Often it is a matter of identifying a parallel description which applies
to two or more of the concepts. The idea of the line of flight as a descriptive

201

phrase, for instance, is clearly connected to the rhizome: "There is a rupture
in the rhizome whenever segmentary lines explode into a line of flight, but
the line of flight is part of the rhizome. . . . You may make a rupture, draw a
line of flight, yet there is still a danger that you will reencounter organiza-
tions that restratify everything . . ." (A Thousand Plateaus 9). This passage
suggests that the concept of escaping an organizational structure is an integral
part of the rhizome, and we see that the rhizome joins a complex of terms
that suggest motion, escape, destabilization: nomadism, speed, deterritoriali-
zation. At the end of the introductory chapter on the rhizome in A
Thousand Plateaus, the philosophers summarize the principal characteristics
of a rhizome, at this point further defining the concept:

Unlike a structure, which is defined by a set of points and posi-
tions, with binary relations between the points and biunivocal
relationships between the positions, the rhizome is made only
of lines: lines of segmentarity and stratification as its dimen-
sions, and the line of flight or deterritorialization as the
maximum dimension after which the multiplicity undergoes
metamorphosis, changes in nature. (21)

This passage helps to highlight one primary perception that their work

continually emphasizes: a sense that things are always in flux, that either a

state (of things, matter, people, whatever) is reaching toward stability or in the

process of (escape from) dissolution. Any one state of affairs is never fixed but

always in a state of change, of flux.17 Many of their concept-pairs reiterate in

different terms this same idea: the nomad vs. the State, deterritorialization

1 One example of this tendency occurs in a passage in which they discuss the 1968 uprising in
France, which "was molecular," according to Deleuze and Guattari: "A molecular flow was
escaping, minuscule at first, then swelling, without, however, ceasing to be unassignable. The
reverse, however, is also true: molecular escapes and movements would be nothing if they did
not return to the molar organizations to reshuffle their segments, their binary distributions of
sexes, classes, and parties" (A Thousand Plateaus 216-217).

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vs. reterritorialization, destratification vs. (re)stratification, the smooth vs.
the striated, the rhizome vs. the arborescent.

The concept-pair molecular/molar also follows this tendency, with the
molecular falling on the side of the rhizome. In defining society, they speak
of the molecular in terms used in descriptions of the rhizome: "From the
viewpoint of a micropolitics, a society is defined by its lines of flight, which
are molecular. There is always something that flows or flees, that escapes the
binary organizations, the resonance apparatus, the overcoding machine ..."
(216). The molecular is rhizomatic insofar as it opposes a totality — the
"molar," which is defined as being "of or pertaining to a body of matter as a
whole, perceived apart from molecular or atomic properties."18 The molar
here functions like the arborescent as that which hierarchizes, that which
imposes an external structure: "In a molecular population (mass) there are
only local connections between discrete particles. In the case of a molar
population (superindividual or person) locally connected discrete particles
have become correlated at a distance" (Massumi 54-55). These molecular
connections between discrete particles, like atoms that are bonded in a
molecule, constitute a rhizome in its multiple connectivities.

In terms of writing, a "molecular" approach would suggest a form of
writing that is equivalent to brainstorming strategies in current composition-
al methods. Rhizographers, that is, should spontaneously generate text-boxes,
as the urge or desire drives them, with no fear or concern of relevance or
disposition (in the rhetorical sense of "arrangement"). Such a method would

18Massumi offers a helpful discussion of these matters, here speaking in terms of an individual:
"The basic change is in the 'mode of composition' or 'consistency' of the individual, in other
words in the way in which the particles hold together. The statistical accumulation started as
a shifting mass brought together by fragmentary processes operating particle by particle
through strictly local connections, or in a manner that could be called 'molecular.' The resulting
multilayered individual was then grasped as a whole by a set of outside forces working in
concert and molded into a well-defined superindividual or 'molar' formation" (48).

203

cultivate "local connections" between discrete ideas that are associationally
related. The proximity of two text-boxes in Storyspace, then, would indicate
some relation, though this relationship would not have to follow logically
but could be metaphorical, allegorical, or metonymic. Pursuing tangential
lines of thinking would thus be encouraged — even insisted upon — in a
rhizography.

Defining this procedure in the terms of classical rhetoric, the first and
third steps of rhetoric — inventio and elocutio, brainstorming and writing —
collapse and become the same step. Composition as such would take on the
appearance of a brainstorming cluster done on paper: nodes /topics linked to
other nodes/topics by associational links (the lines connecting the topics).
The traditional second step of rhetoric — dispositio, arrangement — would
follow. In terms of the molecular /molar distinction, arrangement would be
the molar formation, the perception of patterns among the various molecular
clusters that emerges after the molecular growth has spontaneously occurred.
Brian Massumi uses the analogy of "muck" in its process of formation as an
example of this transition from a chaotic, molecular state to an overarching
molar organization:

Our granules of muck were an oozing molecular mass, but as
their local connections rigidified into rock, they became
stabilized and homogenized, increasing the organizational
consistency of different regions in the deposit (correlation). (55)

The writer can then arrange the emergent molarities into an architecture,

into a three-dimensional memory palace built within the Storyspace

program. The electronic memory palace, then, comes to fulfill the role of

dispositio.

But in this electronic rhetoric, the writer is not confined to following

the steps in precise order. S/he may decide to consider the arrangement first,

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and then go on to inventing/writing. In this procedure, dispositio becomes
step one, and the combined steps of inventio/elocutio come afterward. As
Massumi writes, "Molarity implies the creation or prior existence of a well-
defined boundary enabling the population of particles to be grasped as a
whole" (55). Molarity as the creation of a well-defined boundary describes
rhizography when dispositio comes after writing has begun; molarity as the
prior existence of a well-defined boundary describes rhizography when
dispositio is the first step in the process.

Does not this latter version of rhizography contradict the rhizomatic
process of undermining arborescent totalities? Not necessarily. The differ-
ence lies in the relationship of the structure to the content. In traditional
composition instruction, no such relation between content and form exists;
the five-paragraph theme structure is the empty vessel into which students
put their thoughts. To use the language of mnemonics, the topics (the
paragraphs) of a five-paragraph theme are empty places (topoi) to be filled by
the student. In rhizography, on the other hand, the molar structure should
relate somehow to the molecular infrastructure. While it may be more
difficult to start with a molar structure and then write spontaneously in a way
that fulfills the demands of the molarity, it would not be impossible. Of
course, the molar structure can always be changed later should the molecular
particularities mutate into some other form. But as long as the quick, light,
associational writing is not constricted by the initial imposition of a structure,
then taking the step of dispositio first should not conflict with the sponta-
neous spirit of rhizography.

Massumi's use of "muck" to illustrate the transition from molecular to
molar includes a qualification that maintains the Deleuzoguattarian empha-
sis on flux: "Its particles are correlated, but not rigidly so. It has boundaries,

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but fluctuating ones. It is the threshold leading from one state to another"
(55). This aspect of muck, of the molecular/molar fluctuation, and of their
general focus on the liminal moment of transition — the between — corre-
sponds to the general unfinished state of electronic texts. Commenting on
how electronic publishing will change scholarly publishing, R. A. Shoaf
writes the following, paraphrasing Bill Readings' essay in the electronic
publication Surfaces :

In the world of Internet publishing, length is no longer a valid
criterion for rejecting an item of work. Similarly, related to the
issue of length, a work need never be "finished" again (works, of
course, are never finished anyway, simply abandoned). Any
work can be updated, revised, expanded, altered, corrected indefi
nitely, because of its electronic form and availability through
the Internet. These are radical changes if one stops to consider
the criteria used in the past for judging what does and does not
go into a journal. . . . [T]hese developments can clearly be
liberating. (7-8)

Electronic media are suited to a philosophy of the fluid, which characterizes

the poststructural paradigm as well as electronic texts.19

^Characterizing Leibniz's philosophy, Deleuze writes, "Essentialism makes a classic of
Descartes, while Leibniz's thought appears to be a profound Mannerism. Classicism needs a
solid and constant attribute for substance, but Mannerism is fluid, and the spontaneity of
manners replaces the essentiality of the attribute" (The Fold 56). The emphasis on flow and
fluids recurs: in the chapter "What is an Event?" Deleuze writes, "Events are fluvia. From
then on what allows us to ask, 'Is it the same flow, the same thing or the same occasion?'" (79).
The monad is said to be "a lapping of waves" (86), and the baroque view sees matter as
overflowing like fluid: "matter tends to spill over in space, to be reconciled with fluidity at
the same time fluids themselves are divided into masses" (4). Luce Irigaray also emphasizes
the fluid in This Sex Which Is Not One, in which she recognizes the correlation between
logocentric logicality and solids: "what structuration of (the) language does not maintain a
complicity of long standing between rationality and a mechanics of solids alone? " (107). In this
chapter, titled "The 'Mechanics' of Fluids," she writes of how scientists try to make a solid out
of fluids in order to render it predictable, to analyze it, to find formulas that define its
behavior, and she sees this as characteristic of the masculine attitude toward women in
general. Fluids, then, suggest a kind of feminist thinking beyond the masculine: "And yet that
woman-thing speaks. But not 'like,' not 'the same, ' not 'identical with itself nor to any x etc.
Not a 'subject,' unless transformed by phallocratism. It speaks 'fluid' . . ." (111). These
poststructural texts rely on fluidity as a significant metaphor in the development of their
respective theories, which makes fluidity common to poststructural theory as well as the
characteristics of electronic textuality as described by scholars like Shoaf and Lanham. In
Revising Prose, Lanham writes of "Electronic Literacy" and of the difference between printed

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Recent theories of the mind, as developed by cognitive scientists,

describe the activity of the brain in similar terms. The insight that these

theories provide points to a conception of memory that supports the

connectionist theory as opposed to the AI theory: the latter builds computers

that store memories in a single, localizable place, whereas the former tries to

build computers that store memories in no particular place:

In a standard computer, information sits there, waiting to be
used, and is the same entity while it is waiting as it is while it
is being used. Something far more exotic and ethereal is going
on in a connectionist network. The information cannot really
be said to exist at all when it is not being used. . . . Memories are
not stored, they are recreated over and over again in response to
whatever reminds you of them. (Campbell 163)

This description of memory follows from the recent theories of the schema,

theories which posit that structures of neuronal pathways form in the brain

from our everyday experiences, and these are activated by stimuli from the

outside world. Any new experience is always tested against existing schemas

to make sense out of the experience. Thus, schemas work to filter out much

of the information entering through our senses. But these schemas are by no

means fixed in the mind; on the contrary, like memories, they are recreated

every time a stimulus activates a particular neuronal pathway and are

therefore liable to revision. The following passage describes the schema in

terms of a fluid metaphor:

Only in the most superficial sense can a schema of this kind be
described as a mental object, a ready-made interpretation that is
stacked in memory like a book on a shelf, always the same no
matter how often it is taken down from the shelf and read. In
fact, it is more like the pattern of waves on the surface of an
ocean, reflecting the countless influences and forces at work
beneath the surface of the water, and in the shifting, restless
depth. (Campbell 197)

and electronic texts: " [Print] fixes things. Electronic text unfixes them. It is by nature
changeable, antiauthoritarian" (86).

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To fully engage in rhizography as a mode of electronic composition
that avoids residual literacy, then, we must encourage the naturally asso-
ciative tendencies of our brains. The network effect that hypertext provides
calls for a method of writing that emulates the brain in its connectivity: the
more connections there are, the more densely meaningful the composition is,
as in this description of "bridge-definitions" by Marvin Minsky:

What people call "meanings" do not usually correspond to
particular and definite structures, but to connections among
and across fragments of great interlocking networks of connec-
tions and constraints among our agencies. (131)

A higher number of connections brings about an increased quality of
information storage, as the increased number of "molecular" connections
facilitates navigation through the information: "The connections as a whole
define the information content of the system" (Campbell 12). The more
connections there are, the more information is contained in the system,
despite its limited volume.

Competence, then, would be based on criteria other than those derived
from an ideology of depth. The mode of evaluating the performance of a
rhizographer — his level of competence — cannot come from the metaphor of
depth, which governs evaluation within the alphabetic apparatus (answering
questions like "Is he a deep thinker?" "Has his analysis achieved depth?"
"Is it a penetrating analysis?"). In comparison to density, which describes
proximity within a three-dimensional space, depth merely acknowledges one
vector in a three-dimensional model — that of one downward line perpendic-
ular to the surface. Density, therefore, a word signifying the tightness of a
cluster of discrete particles (such as molecules or hypertext nodes) is one way
of evaluating the success of a hypertext document.

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A nomadic style of rhizography therefore compares to essay writing as
neural network research compares to AI research: the former affirms the
simultaneity of parallel processing while the latter affirms the seriality of
computer logic. An essay is written in a linear fashion, serially presenting
point by point, one after the other, whereas a hypertext composition allows
for multiple pathways through the information to co-exist simultaneously
within a given text rather than choosing one of these pathways as in the
essay.

The virtue of rhizography, then, may lie in its privileging of
simultaneity, its graphing of the rhizomatic nature of parallel processing, as
current research in cognitive science views the brain to be a neural network:
"The brain seems to be able to perform as many as two hundred trillion
operations in a second; not serially, but simultaneously" (Campbell 12). This
is the difference between computer thinking and human thinking, between
the brain as AI research conceives it and the brain as connectionist theory
conceives it: one requires a hierarchized, step-by-step process to achieve its
retrieval of information while the other functions by a multiple and
synchronous firing of the neurons. This is why the multi-linear format of
hypertext is more amenable to representing human brain activity than the
strictly linear format of print literacy.

My position assumes that representing the mind in action is a useful
endeavor to pursue. Given the efficiency and power of the brain's storage
and retrieval system, such a goal would be favorable if the desire were to
approximate the capacity of the mind to perform these functions. This
dissertation has addressed throughout the need to adopt a more efficient
means of information storage and retrieval, since the pressure due to
information overload has provided stress upon current storage strategies (i.e.

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book/paper storage). Setting aside the relative virtues of more accurately
representing brain activity, however, I have here shown hypertext to have
the potential of being structured like the brain insofar as each manifests a
rhizomatic pattern, a multi-linear format that differs drastically from the
arborescent pattern of literacy.

As a philosophical concept that considers the brain as a nonlinear
entity more similar to crabgrass than to trees, the rhizome is also charac-
terized in terms of memory. Deleuze and Guattari contend that "the rhizome
is an antigenealogy. It is a short-term memory, or antimemory" (A Thousand
Plateaus 21). They categorize the two different kinds of memory within the
rhizome-arborescent schema: "The difference between them is not simply
quantitative: short-term memory is of the rhizome or diagram type, and
long-term memory is arborescent and centralized" (16). Such a conception of
the rhizome as short-term or antimemory might seem to problematize my
project. After all, if my goal is finding strategies for improved storage and
retrieval of information, if I have set out from the start treating hypertext as a
mnemonic prosthesis, then why this talk of forgetting? If short-term
memory is rhizomatic and "includes forgetting as a process" (16), then how
can the rhizome be an appropriate conceptual foundation for a hypertext
compositional practice?

To answer these questions, I must briefly return to a consideration of
Spenser as providing instructions for how to negotiate our current
transitional shift. This return will justify the earlier discussions of Spenser's
use of prosopopoeia and his motivation for doing so as relating to changes
that print literacy brought to textuality. In the same way that Spenser grasped
and exploited the monumental possibilities of print, we too must consider

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how composers can fully embrace the electronic media that are more and
more at our disposal.

I have argued that Spenser turns to prosopopoeia as a trope that
crystallizes the experience of print. Its rhetorical capacity to give voice to the
voiceless dead serves a memorial function that becomes more efficacious
with the permanence that print can provide. The permanence of stable
textual production takes some time to truly establish itself as the norm, of
course, but Spenser senses, I suspect, this inherent characteristic and uses this
ploy as a new way to persuade potential patrons. Insofar as prosopopoeia is
associated with remembering the dead, it figures the emotion of mourning,
both in Spenser's minor poems and in contemporary theoretical considera-
tions. The equivalence of a printed text to a concrete monument marking a
grave might be exaggerated, but when compared to the relative instability that
preceded it in the age of chirography, their association is not inappropriate.

Given my desire to learn from Spenser how to negotiate our current
moment of transition, I find in Spenser's choice of prosopopoeia as the
primary trope of print literacy the injunction to choose a trope that would
help to cohere the experience of working in electronic media. Finding such a
trope might help to accelerate the process of transition within which we as an
educational institution find ourselves, as it would organize people's percep-
tions about the new media by establishing and clarifying the key character-
istics of computeracy in the same way that prosopopoeia clarifies the key
characteristics of print literacy. This trope should therefore function as an
artificial indicator of potential attributes which create expectations and
thereby reduce the anxiety induced by the transition in cognitive modes from
arborescence to rhizomatics.

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The trope that I propose will perform this function for the medium of
hypertext is metalepsis. The main element of metalepsis, according to
Lanham's A Handlist of Rhetorical Terms, is the "omission of a central term
in an extended metaphor" (66). Metalepsis therefore manifests a quality of
jumping to conclusions or of skipping the presentation of a step-by-step
progression from point to point, metaphor to metaphor, as a way of provid-
ing its rhetorical effect. This definition embodies the filmic logic of hypertext
insofar as hypertext is a medium of juxtaposed fragments that could facilitate
the process of metalepsis. As a defining feature of video and filmic media,
juxtaposition embodies the metaleptic feature of omitting the explanatory
link between two terms, leaving a gap to be filled in by the one encountering
the text. One might perceive this process of omission as a kind of forgetting, a
conscious forgetting that omits its central term on purpose. Such a structure,
then, would position literacy and computeracy as opposed in the same way
that remembering and forgetting are.

Other features of literacy and computeracy that oppose one another, as
in the descriptions of the monumentality of print documents versus the anti-
monumentality of electronic texts, reinforce this opposition between
remembering and forgetting.20 I have described the monumental drive in
the apparatus of print as being motivated by an attempt to remember, to make
permanent. In electronic texts, however, forgetting becomes the norm, as
drafts of previous texts, once made inexorably permanent by print, are now
able to be forgotten in electronic formats, replaced by different versions that
can be replaced again.21 This anti-monumental feature of electronic

20For one of these accounts, see Lanham, Revising Prose, chapter five on "Electronic Literacy."

21 See the editorial comments of any published essay in the electronic journal Surfaces, which
requests those wishing to cite its texts to "consult the journal at source in order to be sure of using
the latest version."

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publishing is similar to the features of short-term memory, which functions
because of its ability to forget what was previously stored there in order to
store the new information. Though the computer's capacity to save various
versions of a document undermines this comparison of electronic textuality
and short-term memory, the ephemeral and ethereal quality of electronic
texts, which provide them with the anti-monumental features that Lanham
and Bolter point out, makes it more similar to short-term memory than
printed texts.

So the Deleuzoguattarian emphasis on forgetting as rhizomatic
described above supports the choice of metalepsis as an organizational trope
for the medium of hypertext, given my conception of metalepsis as
embodying a form of forgetting in its very structure. Deleuze's notoriety for
studying the philosophers of joy also reinforces this choice of the trope of
forgetting, in that forgetting might be viewed as a joyful process. Certainly
the antithesis of gravity and weight, both metaphoric features of the
seriousness of traditional Western philosophy, can be found in the lightness
or joy that the nomadic rhizome manifests. I imagine that Deleuze was
attracted to these philosophers of joy for the reason that, from his point of
view, they opposed this Western tradition of the melancholy philosopher,
providing an alternative to the typical conclusions reached. Metalepsis as a
trope of forgetting, then, replaces prosopopoeia as a trope of remembering in
the move from print to electronics, and the primary emotion evolves from
mourning into joy.

The question of how to incorporate the memory palace tradition
within an electronic rhetoric that foregrounds forgetting remains to be
answered. Umberto Eco asks a question similar to the one posed here in his
essay "An Ars Oblivionalis? Forget It!" Playfully imagining the existence of

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an "art of forgetting," Eco proceeds to show that such an art would be
impossible by demonstrating mnemotechnics to be a semiotic system, which
is "inherently ill-suited to stimulating] forgetfulness" (255). After providing
a thorough discussion of the semiotic character of mnemotechnics, he does,
however, provide "strategies for producing oblivion": "There are no
voluntary devices for forgetting, but there are devices for remembering badly:
it is necessary to multiply the semiosis. . . . One forgets not by cancellation but
by superimposition, not by producing absence but by multiplying presences"
(259-260). Personal examples of forgetting in this manner reinforce the fear
expressed by writers of many memory treatises that one might have so much
stored in memory that one would confuse the ideas and therefore, in effect,
forget.

Eco's definition of forgetting as a multiplication of presences provides a
description similar to the process of rhizographic writing: the multiplication
of genres, the multi-linearity, and the molecular proliferation of cells all
contribute to a conception of the electronic memory palace as a place of
forgetting, a potentially vast mnemonic space in which writers wander in a
metaleptic, nomadic network of associations. As the World-Wide Web
comes to fruition and more and more people begin to access information via
the hypertext-based Mosaic, the experience of skipping along a surface of
information, of getting lost like a tourist wandering through foreign streets,
of forgetting from where one has come or how one arrived at a particular
node, will become more common. Maybe then Deleuze's assertions will
have become common sense.

CONCLUSION

Mark C. Taylor and Esa Saarinen's latest collaboration, Imagologies:
Media Philosophy, is symptomatic of the effect that the electronic
technologies have had upon scholarly compositional practices. Like J. Hillis
Miller's Illustration, it calls itself a "non-book," but Imagologies comes
much closer to the possibilities of such a phenomenon than Illustration does.
One has a table of contents providing page locations to the beginnings of
chapters, the other has a list of topics with no page references to facilitate
location; one has consecutively counted pages, the other only numbers the
pages of each topic, so that one must know the title of the "chapter" and the
page number to locate a quote; one has page after page of uniformly sized text
set in the text-blocks standardized by the print apparatus, broken occasionally
by an illustration; the other employs multiple fonts in variable sizes,
maximizes the amount of white space on the page, in short fully engages the
potential that the computer offers compositional practice.

Imagology, as Taylor and Saarinen theorize it, presents an electronic
rhetoric that is similar in many ways to the theory of rhizography I have
offered in chapter five. Both recognize the significance of the surface as the
tropic focus of the poststructural, the new mandate of speed that promises to
change the way we think about thinking, and the need to wander through
information as though a tourist. The synchronicity of my work with that of
the very recently published Imagologies points to the convergence of these

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215

issues at this transitional moment, when the apparatus of print is giving way
to the apparatus of electronic media.

As a way of negotiating this current shift, I have pointed to a prior
transitional moment in the sixteenth century, when the effects of the printing
press were beginning to bear upon the pedagogical practices and textuality of
the time. Studying Edmund Spenser as a case in point, I show him to be a
writer in the midst of a shift in the apparatus, a shift from manuscript culture
to print culture, during which methods of mnemonic storage and retrieval
changed dramatically. My study of Spenser offers no illuminating insights
into Spenser's textuality; it merely attempts to situate him within a particular
period of historical change that has frequently been compared to our own as a
way of better understanding our own moment. His poems straddle the
divide between the oral mnemonics of the memory palace and the literate
mnemonics of prosopopoeia, and his ambivalent embrace of the latter
mirrors our own hesitancy to enter the electronic era as quickly as it has come
upon the scene of scholarship and pedagogy in the 1990's.

From Spenser's adoption of prosopopoeia as the primary trope of
literacy, I extrapolate the need to discover a primary trope of computeracy that
will organize the experience of writing within the electronic apparatus. The
trope that I propose will provide this is metalepsis, a trope of forgetting.
Contrasting the paradigm of print literacy to the emergent paradigm of
computer literacy helps to understand the differences between prosopopoeia
as a trope of mourning which monumentalizes inscription, making it
permanent, and metalepsis as a trope of joy, of a playfulness which makes
inscription fluid and impermanent. The investment in an ideology of depth,
which marks the gravity and seriousness of academic discourse, is giving way
to an ideology of the surface, of the superficial, which allows for the play of

216

the signifier and the predominance of the pun. Poststructuralism, in partic-
ular the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze and his work with Felix Guattari,
provides the theoretical justification for these emphases on the surface, on
anti-memory, on a philosophy of joy, giving my choice of metalepsis as the
trope of computeracy its necessary philosophical foundation.

Aside from this schematic comparison of prosopopoeia and metalepsis
and of print literacy and computer literacy, which grows out of my analysis of
Spenser's method of fully exploiting the potential of print in all of its charac-
teristics, I have derived a model for employing the memory palace as a way of
organizing information from the House of Alma episode in FQ 11.10, which
allegorizes the body as a memory palace in which information is stored.
Recall that the heroes Guyon and Arthur tour the House of Alma, starting at
the bowels, moving to the heart, and ending at the brain, where they discover
the mythical histories recounting the succession stories of Britain and Faery
Land in the chamber of Eumnestes (which translates as "Good Memory"). As
I have pointed out in chapter three, the storage of books containing informa-
tion within a chamber, a memory "cell," invokes the Art of Memory tradi-
tion, which instructs one to locate imagines agentes within pre-established
loci or memory places as a way of storing information in the mind.
Spenser's method of allegorizing the body as a castle or memory palace
suggests a similar practice for organizing a hypertext document: finding in
the body a means of arranging its textual elements in a sensible fashion.

From Spenser's model, then, I derived a structure for a hypertext that I
composed entitled "Genetis: A Rhizography."1 The title suggests the
structural metaphor of genetics, the "natural" medium for information

1 This has been published in disk form in Perforations 5, a multi-media publication that
includes text, computer disks, audio tapes, and video.

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storage,2 and suggests something of its contents, which proposes on one level
genetics as a metaphor for generic invention. The use of genetic principles
and structures to conceptualize the organization of a hypertext environment
draws upon a twentieth-century understanding of the body in the same way
that Spenser drew upon sixteenth-century physiology in his allegorized body.3
Since the current biological term "cell" comes from the Latin word cella
meaning "store-room," having a hypertext composed of "cella" or store-
rooms modeled after the cells of the body made sense (if only at the level of
the signifier). Jay Bolter's use of "cell" to describe the fundamental elements
of the Storyspace hypertext program and his equation of hypertext as a
dungeon, as I have pointed out in chapter four, also support this conflation of
the memory palace with genetics.

Choosing DNA as a specific aspect of cellular composition offers a
number of advantages. First, it provides a three-dimensional model for the
problem of structuration, thereby offering one solution to a new compo-
sitional problematic posed by the three-dimensional status of the hypertext
environment. The writers of one essay advise composers of electronic texts to
look to the sciences for ways to visually communicate information, which is

2 Biochemistry employs the metaphor of language to describe the processes of genetic
reproduction. Wood et al. write, for instance, that "most biomolecules are built from 30 small-
molecule precursors, sometimes called the alphabet of biochemistry" (7) and that "The genetic
code is the relationship between twenty-letter language of the proteins to the four-letter
language of the nucleic acids" (462). Lewontin, a leading geneticist, compares the information
that DNA provides with words in a language, which require a particular context to determine
meaning: "A deep reason for the difficulty in devising causal information from DNA messages
is that the same 'words' have different meanings in different contexts and multiple functions in
a given context, as in any complex language" (66). Eric Havelock examines this metaphor and
derives from it a model of cultural inheritance to explain how an oral culture preserves its
identity: "The term 'information' [used by biologist Ernst Mayr in his discussion of genetics]
embodies a metaphor borrowed from the idiom of human culture and applied backwards to the
genetic process" (55).

-^Another possibility, one perhaps more appealing to Renaissance scholars, would be to use
sixteenth-century conceptions of physiology as a way of organizing a hypertext about the
sixteenth century.

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precisely the problem that writing a hypertext presents to the writer, and

mention DNA as one model:

Nevertheless, a more formalized "rhetoric" of visual communi-
cation already exists in advanced science. While "graphic" equi-
valences for mathematical formulae have been standard
ancillary forms of expression, some fields of science can only be
comprehended in pictorial form: the twisting, paired strands of
DNA, brain maps, flight dynamics, and fluid-flow computations.
Surely, given the tremendous interest in scientific visualization
and data-driven graphics, the notion of text-driven abstractions
can't be far behind. (Carlson and Gonzalez 26)

Carlson and Gonzalez recognize the value of scientific strategies of
visualizing information as potential metaphors of hypertext architectures,
and such recognition supports the assertions by theorists like Landow that
hypertext will foster not only interdisciplinary collaboration but also inter-
disciplinary cross-pollination of ideas and concepts. For my hypertext, DNA,
with its helical structure and its linked pairs of purines and pyrimidines
structured in a plateau or ladder-like fashion, furnishes a visual schema for
the deployment of information in a three-dimensional writing space.

Second, DNA provides an allegorical model for invention. DNA, as
the basis for the generation of new life, supplies the guidelines for inventing
hybrid forms or mutations of pre-existing entities, be they animal species or
literary forms. Such is one goal of grammatology: the invention of new
genres that emerge from the characteristics of the electronic media. Ulmer's
work in Teletheory: Grammatology in the Age of Video and Heuretics: The
Logic of Invention, in which he creates the genre of "mystory" for
videography and "chorography" for hypermedia composition, provides two
exemplars of such inventive practice. Such generic invention stems from the
close etymological association of genre and genetics and suggests a general
model of procedure in the electronic realm, especially during the embryonic

219

formation of electronic genres. I subtitle my hypertext "A Rhizography" to
indicate the variant genre defined in chapter five, the principles of which
guided my compositional strategy.

Finally, DNA provides a conceptual model for organizing information
in a three-dimensional space as well. This conceptual model is derived from
the spatially organized feature of DNA molecular structures. These structures
have four levels of organization:

Primary structure is the linear sequence of amino acids in a
polypeptide. Secondary structure refers to certain repeating
conformation patterns. . . . Tertiary structure refers to the over-
all polypeptide conformation. No clear distinction can be made
between secondary and tertiary structure. Quaternary structure
refers to the spatial relationships between subunits in proteins
that consist of two or more polypeptides. (Wood et al. 75)

The emphasis on patterns and on the "spatial relationships between
subunits" here is significant insofar as electronic rhetoric will be a three-
dimensional rhetoric of patterns.4 Readers will need to become adept at
detecting patterns encoded within the information to fully realize the
potential inherent in visual representations of knowledge: "Features
(patterns of meaning and characteristics of content) can be extracted at a
glance, once the reader becomes attuned to the new 'rhetoric' and the new
definition of 'sight' reading" (Carlson and Gonzalez 30). And composers of
three-dimensional texts will have to consider this visual potential for the
conveyance of meaning.

4 Ulmer writes, "There are three ways to organize the release of information, which are used
across all media: narrative, exposition, and pattern. The three modes are not mutually
exclusive; on the contrary, all three are present in any work, with one dominant, and the other
two subordinate. . . . Narrative is the native form of oral culture, exposition is the native form
of alphabetic literacy (in the sense that scientific writing is the privileged discourse of the
print apparatus), and collage pattern is the native form of electronics" ("Grammatology in the
Stacks" 160, 163).

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In my hypertext, I attempted to incorporate such structures into the
disposition of my Storyspace boxes by establishing five plateaus, each of which
had its own primary structure of a strictly linear narrative [taking the cellular
phenomenon of "H-bonds," in that they are "linear and therefore maximally
stable" (Wood et al. 75), as a parallel to the maximal stability that linear
narrative provides and has provided in both oral and literate cultures]. I then
tried to incorporate secondary /tertiary structures of patterns by repeating
themes and motifs in each plateau rather than having each plateau deal with
only one subject. I also conceived of a helical spire twisting downward
through the plateaus, similar to the strands connecting the base pairs
constituting the DNA molecule. While this was not an actual structure
within the three-dimensional authoring environment of Storyspace, working
with such a visual conception allowed me to organize some of the cells in an
alternative pathway that amounts to a tour of the text. DNA, therefore, came
to provide both a literal as well as a metaphoric model for organizing my
hypertext.

This dissertation has worked in part to furnish the hypertext composer
with a three-dimensional mnemonic strategy, found in the pre-Ramist art of
the memory palace, as a basic organizational device for situating the cells of a
Storyspace document. The above discussion of the structure of "Generis"
offers one example of how knowledge of Spenser's specific use of this
tradition helped me in negotiating the problem of hypertext dispositio. As
an attempt to answer the question concerning how our educational institu-
tions will write in hypertext, therefore, this work is a first step in the direction
of the "New Rhetoric" that Barthes and Barilli call for in their writing of the
history of rhetoric, an electronic rhetoric of the image as well as the word, of
the three-dimensional writing spaces that electronic media provide.

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The memory palace is not the only feature of Medieval and
Renaissance culture that offers viable strategies for compositional practice in
hypertext, however. For additional instruction on how to fully exploit the
potential for writing with images that the computer offers, I suggest that
further research be carried out in the Medieval and Renaissance periods, a
time when writers quite naturally fused image and text. One such area of
potential exploration, as Tom Conley has suggested, should be typography:

The delight we sense in contact with the materiality of early
modern writing can be used to open a dialectic between our
grasp of the sixteenth century and that of our own historical
moment. I would like to suggest that typographical form may
provide one avenue of appeal. (2-3)

Conley identifies the ways in which Early Modern writing manifests a

concern for the visual aspect of letters, a concern inherited from the period

prior to the advent of the printing press. During that time, composers of

illuminated manuscripts artistically rendered letters according to what their

forms indicated, in a manner reminiscent of hieroglyphics or runes.5 Given

the current revolution in "desktop typography," a revolution which indicates

how the computer has resurrected a hieroglyphic sensibility among graphic

designers who create new fonts based on their visual appeal and allegorical

possibilities, such study could be fruitful.

A second area of potential exploration should be the emblem book,

with its use of images (sometimes repeated in variable contexts) chastened by

words. As writers begin to write visually, a fusion of writing and image

reminiscent of the emblem book will come about, and the kinds of practices

engaged in by emblem book readers and writers will become more frequent.

5 For one example of this process, see Viglionese, 377. For further discussion of allegorical
letters, with consideration of the ideological suppositions implicit in handwriting practices of
the sixteenth century, see Goldberg, Writing Matter, chapter four.

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Images from one context will be appropriated and used in different contexts,
their meanings determined by the surrounding text. Daniel Russell
illuminates such emblem book practices:

But however an emblem is constructed, any emblem picture
taken alone could accommodate other texts that would,
effectively, turn it into a different emblem according to the will
of an active, interpreting viewer, be he the author of another
emblem book or simply the reader who changes the text he has
just read or who physically attaches the picture to another text,
perhaps in another book, as was done from time to time. (174)

Such a description reminds one of the postmodern artistic practices of
appropriation and collage in that "the emblematic processing of traditional
materials" consists of "the fragmentation of well-known allegorical works or
traditional sign systems and the subsequent recombination of fragmented
elements of them into new and striking signifying units" (Russell 164). In
this "age of electronic reproduction," in which some individuals now have
laser printers and scanners in their homes as well as the capacity to manipu-
late video imagery in desktop editing programs, the kind of appropriation
once confined to clipping images from an emblem book becomes digitized,
and the kind of active reading inaugurated in the sixteenth century becomes
the norm.6

A final area of potential exploration would engage in a sustained treat-
ment of how Medieval and Renaissance definitions and uses of allegory
compare to twentieth-century definitions and uses of allegory. One reductive
feature of this dissertation involves its conflation of the former with that of
the latter, insofar as the allegory in Spenser's texts and in the practice of pre-
Ramist mnemonics is unproblematically equated with the allegory of post-
structural theorists and poststructural historians of rhetoric. The treatment I

6 For a discussion of how this situation has put stress upon the current system of copyright law,
see Landow, Hypertext, 198-201.

223

am calling for here would consider exactly what features of Medieval and
Renaissance allegory could be translated into the allegorical form of writing
that the computer encourages.

This "computerate" allegory that promises to emerge also deserves
careful study if composers of electronic texts are to take full advantage of the
possibilities that writing with images offers. Because the everyday practice of
writing will soon incorporate digitized imagery as a standard feature, a return
of "picto-ideo-phonographic" writing will occur, "a double-valued Writing,
ideographic and phonetic at once, which puts speech back in its place in
relation to nonphonetic elements" (Ulmer, Applied Grammatology 98). In
providing the potential to fulfill Derrida's desire "to restore to writing the
balance between design and symbol it had in hieroglyphics" (Applied
Grammatology 46), electronic writing will foster a more allegorical and/or
ironic bent.7 If scholars learn to exploit the allegorical potential in
typography8 and rebus-writing, then the reading of scholarship might become
equivalent to the reading of "literature."

7 On the allegorical nature of hieroglyphic writing and its connection to poststructuralism, see
Owens, "The Allegorical Impulse." On the relation of allegory to irony, see Paul de Man, "The
Rhetoric of Temporality."

8 Conley writes of the allegorical nature of letters and this awareness as manifest in the
sixteenth century: "If perspectival, calligraphic, or hieroglyphic properties of the visible
letter were used to structure literature of the time, its decipherment also offered poets and
artists other avenues for transcoding meanings. A piece of type could become a landscape, a
chimera, it could turn into what it was not — into a monogram, a cipher, a number, a vocable
from a foreign tongue — all the while remaining a letter" (12).

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BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH

Richard Edward Smyth was born in Tarrytown, New York, on March
30, 1964. He grew up in Ossining, New York, and moved to North Port,
Florida, in 1978, graduating from Lemon Bay High School in 1982. Having
started his undergraduate studies at the University of Tampa, he finished his
B.A. in English at the University of Florida, receiving his degree in 1986. He
then continued, receiving his M.A. in English in 1988 and doing one year of
Ph.D. work, at which point, due to the birth of twin boys, he went to work as a
high school English teacher at Port Charlotte High School in Southwest
Florida. Returning to graduate school two years later, he received his Ph.D. in
English in August, 1994. His publications include essays entitled "Rhizo-
graphy: A Manifesto for Hypertext Composition" in Inner Space Outer Space:
Humanities, Technology, and the Postmodern World (Proceedings from the
Southern Humanities Council) and "Old Solutions to New Problems:
Looking to Renaissance Texts for Strategies of Hypertext Composition" in The
Politics and Processes of Scholarly Publishing (forthcoming); a hypertext
document entitled "Genetis: A Rhizography" and published as part of the
Perforations 5 multi-media publication; and poetry in such publications as
Southern Poetry Review, Tampa Revieiv, Kansas Quarterly, The Florida
Review, The Midivest Quarterly, Wisconsin Reviezv, South Florida Poetry
Review, Caesura, Apalachee Quarterly, and others. He accepted a position as
Assistant Professor of English at Hamline University in St. Paul, Minnesota,
beginning in September, 1994.

238

I certify that I have read this study and that in my opinion it conforms
to acceptable standards of scholarly presentation and is fully adequate, in
scope and quality, as a dissertation for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy.

Gregory L. Ulmer, Chairman
Professor of English

I certify that I have read this study and that in my opinion it conforms
to acceptable standards of scholarly presentation and is fully adequate, in
scope and quality, as a dissertation for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy.

C^c^-

<^T^^^>

Ira Clark

Professor of English

I certify that I have read this study and that in my opinion it conforms
to acceptable standards of scholarly presentation and is fully adequate, in
scope and quality, as a dissertation for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy.

in Mure
Assistant Professor of English

I certify that I have read this study and that in my opinion it conforms
to acceptable standards of scholarly presentation and is fully adequate, in
scope and quality, as a dissertation for the degree-of Doctor of Philosophy.

JackTerlette

Associate Professor of English

I certify that I have read this study and that in my opinion it conforms
to acceptable standards of scholarly presentation and is fully adequate, in
scope and quality, as a dissertation for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy.

Ben Nelms

Professor of Instruction and
Curriculum

This dissertation was submitted to the Graduate Faculty of the
Department of English in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences and to the
Graduate School and was accepted as partial fulfillment of the requirements
for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy.

August, 1994

Dean, Graduate School

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